Books: Nik Sharma’s The Flavor Equation
Books
Chemistry, Emotion, and a Unique Roadmap to Cooking and Tasting Food
By Chris Malloy
The Flavor Equation: The Science of Great Cooking Explained by Nik Sharma, 352 pages, hardcover, Chronicle Books, $35 (2020).
At first The Flavor Equation, the second cookbook by molecular biologist and San Francisco Chronicle columnist Nik Sharma, seems to owe a debt to Salt Fat Acid Heat, the blockbuster cookbook by his fellow Bay Area cook Samin Nosrat. Nosrat divides the “elements of good cooking” into the four buckets of her title. Sharma takes things further; his equation is emotion + sight + sound + mouthfeel + aroma + taste = flavor. He further divides taste into seven “types,” and the book’s full-length recipes appear as he cycles through them. Some overlap with Nosrat’s, including “saltiness,” “richness,” “brightness,” and “fieriness.”
But as you deeply read Sharma’s text, strewn with infographics and pithy explainers anchored by chemistry and biology, the similarities retreat. Sharma attempts to build an abstract case for how flavor works, one that gives ample weight to sound, contends that both personal experience and memory are foundational, and the flavor varies considerably based on the taster’s culture. The Flavor Equation manages to largely prove this case, though a few questions remain. In the end, Sharma’s book, which freely crosses between gastronomic traditions, provides tiers of value: as a collection of simple kitchen hacks and little-known facts, as a source of memorable recipes, and as a tool for modifying your base understanding of food and cooking.
Both the intro and early sections are sprinkled with examples from his personal journey, stories that paint his arc from growing up in Bombay to new-American-and-grad-student to shooting food photos for a startup and his blog, A Brown Table, to his first cookbook, Season, and becoming one of the more celebrated food writers in the United States.
Each major element of his equation, treated in the early sections, gets rigorous treatment. For instance, ten pages on mouthfeel go far beyond a study of texture. Sharma explains, for starters, how receptors sense food that touches the mouth, how a food’s temperature shapes its taste, and how the mechanics of “tingling” sensations work, like a capsaicin burn or the bubbles of a carbonated drink bursting on the tongue. To illustrate the way some of these interact, he explores “making food crispy” and “thickening a sauce,” each science-driven explainer replete with tips (e.g., food rich in sugar burns faster when frying). Four infographics round out the section. The infographics are particularly useful, each a 101 course in itself. In “mouthfeel,” they cover emulsions, texture enhancers (like pork rinds, flaky salt, or crumbled cookies), and how each part of an egg changes texturally when it reaches certain temperatures.
With the facts brimming, reading can feel like braving a hurricane of information. And although most of the infographics are excellent and add to our understanding of Sharma’s equation, some attempt too much and end up subtracting. For instance, “aromas by chemical structure” looks like a traffic jam. But all in all, Sharma organizes his information well. He has a talent for bending verbal and visual data (including refreshingly dark photos he shot himself) to the needs of the reader.
After Sharma explains the elements of his equation, the cooking begins. Given his unique combination of scientific chops and experience with Mumbai’s cooking in particular, readers of all cooking levels stand to learn.
The recipes take many forms. The book’s inside cover is printed with a multi-path roadmap for making nut butters. Sharma crams micro recipes for roast chickens with ultra-crisp skin into prose paragraphs. The real-deal, full-length recipes don’t start until page 72 of 352. These recipes have cultural range and vary from easy (burrata with chile oil, or candy made from heated honey) to more laborious and intricate (lamb koftas in almond sauce). Some themes recur, including finishing with cilantro, heating spices in oil to flavor both it and them, and the thoughtful melding of Indian and Western gastronomic traditions (fried eggs with masala hash browns).
The main run of recipes fall under the subsections of “flavor,” beginning with “brightness,” which opens with a memory: Sharma near his grandparents’ home in Bombay and a beloved sugarcane juice vendor, to whom “all day long, people of all ages flock… for a glass of freshly squeezed, ice-cold juice.” The recipes of this section illustrate how to balance food with brightness using acidic ingredients, such as tamarind, sumac, kefir, and carbonated water.
Like most of Sharma’s recipes, roasted cauliflower in turmeric kefir displays a few really smart touches. While cauliflower is blasting in the oven, you sauté onions in neutral oil, add spices for the last 30 seconds, then pour in kefir (Sharma suggests new kefir, as old kefir is more likely to curdle due to greater lactic acid content). Next, you lower the flame and stir in chickpea flour — for thickness but also gentle flavor notes. The cauliflower goes in. You finish the dish with a tadka, in this case cumin and black mustard seeds toasted in oil “until they start to pop and the cumin starts to brown.” With a late flurry of chopped cilantro, the flavorful dish radiates brightness — from the tangy kefir, from the combo of herb and spices.
As one cooks from “Brightness” into the other “types of taste,” the threads stretch into later taste subcategories. A recipe in “Bitterness,” for grapefruit soda fortified with chai masala simple syrup, also exhibits brightness — the acid of both citrus fruit and carbonated soda introducing a crisp freshness. In “Savoriness,” kanji, rice porridge, made thick with pull-apart chicken thighs, the dish Sharma’s mother used to make for him when he was sick, gets a bright boost from a chutney coursing with chile and lime. In “Richness,” a creamy raita that is about half eggplant builds an illusion that the purple vegetable has been smoked, through the careful use of smoked salt. And in the raita, as ever, the thread of brightness has been woven through, thanks here to lime juice and the acidity (pH 4.3) of yogurt.
In terms of results in my kitchen, Sharma’s recipes range from solid but unspectacular (the cauliflower) to deeply soulful and strong enough to win a spot in your regular rotation (the kanji). And the elements of the equation mostly add up. It would be nice if Sharma had spent more time on the science of how emotion can influence taste and vice versa, bolstering his unconventional argument with hard data. In the end, Sharma does make it clear that emotion recalibrates taste to some degree — but you knew that coming in, and your basic, common-sense understanding isn’t furthered the way it is in, say, the aroma section.
Most of all, the hacks and tidbits that await throughout are gold. Did you know, for instance, that when an emulsion (like a vinaigrette) gets too hot it “falls apart” because its molecules gain excess energy? Or that, when simmering beans for dal (or anything), adding baking soda can drastically reduce cooking time by softening fibers? Or that your throat contains taste receptors, and so do your epiglottis and stomach?
These scattered pearls by themselves justify purchasing The Flavor Equation. And though not every dish is a runaway winner, and though the elements of Sharma’s equation may not add up unless you keep a mind open enough to consider an abstract thesis (one that goes beyond chemistry into memory and emotion), Sharma’s latest cookbook is undoubtedly important, because of its hacks and wisdom, its recipes, and the general solidity of the equation advanced.
But it’s also important because of his voice. His ability, creativity, and rich background — scientist, photographer, cook, and queer immigrant — make his voice one of the most promising and vital in American cooking today. ●
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