Hi! This is Mathu Shalini, the owner of this blog and its Chief Experimentation Officer 🙂
My husband and I stay in Bengaluru (a South-Indian city, earlier called Bangalore) with our 9 year old son. I am a former member of the Indian Civil Services. My current day job revolves around studying education interventions that help kids learn better. In my spare time, I love learning new skills and applying techniques from one hobby to another. I find a lot of joy in the process of making little trinkets – with paper, wood, ceramic, beads, etc – same as the joy I find while cooking up a meal for my family.
Early Days In The Kitchen
I’ve been fascinated by cooking, ever since my pre-teens. That’s when mom started letting me have a go in the kitchen once in a while. I especially loved making ‘tiffin’ items (dishes like idli, dosa, puri, upma, etc – anything except steamed rice-and-curry-based meals). I was good at coming up with new side dishes for chapati and making new kinds of dosas and chutneys. My sister and I thrived on the no-flame-cooking-snacks we made and gorged on, after coming back from school.
But I don’t think I’m a ‘natural’ at cooking.
I remember my first attempt at making semiya (vermicelli) for dinner. This was during my 7th/8th standard summer holidays. My maternal grandparents had come home and I had wanted to impress them with a new ‘semiya biriyani’. But who knew that you don’t add cold water to semiya and bring it to a boil? (You should add semiya to boiling water, instead). The dish ended up being such a sticky mess… After it cooled, I had to dig and extricate the ladle which got cemented into it. Still my grandfather was so beaming proud that his granddaughter had ‘invented’ a new dish!
One other time when my husband and I were traveling abroad, we were missing home food. So I tried to make fish curry. But I did not have any tamarind at hand. The brilliant resourceful-innovative-cook part of me thought of adding lemon juice instead. That is usually a good substitute.. but apparently not when the lemon seeds are also squeezed into the curry. We’ve never had anything so bitter, before or after that.
Fast forward many years and similar episodes. I still mangle many dishes, often while attempting my own take on them 🙂 To save my family from such disasters and to make my recipes more reliable, I started poring through food science resources that explain some of the magical changes that happen when we cook.
My Food Science Foray
It was around 2013 when I first landed on the Harvard Science & Cooking lecture series on Youtube. Since then, over the years, whenever I have a chance to do a lot of cooking (like during annual vacations, maternity leave, COVID lockdown), I would frantically go into a spree of food-science-exploration. I’d take online courses, read books, listen to podcasts, follow blogs and watch videos that explain the science behind everyday cooking.
But the problem is that most of these resources are based on Western cuisine. Also, they are often too technical for my level of understanding. The only Indian-cuisine-based popular science book that I’ve come across is ‘Masala Lab’ by Krish Ashok. (It’s also one of the only two food science books that made me laugh! The other one is “What Einstein Told His Cook’ book series by Robert Wolke).
I started looking for parallels between western dishes and Indian ones, so that I could apply some of the learnings from these other resources to my own cooking. I also started designing and conducting simple experiments in my home kitchen. This blog is a record of my learnings and takeaways in this journey. Understanding the rationale behind recipes not only helps me troubleshoot my cooking. It also helps me turn out the dish in a particular way, every time I make it.
Above all, I enjoy this discovery process and want to share it with others who might enjoy it as well!
Why ‘WHY WHY’?
Why is this site titled the ‘WHY WHY cook? You might of heard of the ‘Five Why’ analysis technique that tries to uncover the root cause of a problem/issue by consecutively asking ‘WHY?’ five times when you get to an answer to the previous ‘Why?’. You might have also come across the WIRED 5 levels series, where an expert explains a topic in five different levels of complexity— first to a child, then a teenager, then an undergrad majoring in the same subject, a graduate student and, finally, a colleague.
While that level of understanding would be awesome, I am not a food scientist. I am simply a home-cook who likes to understand why we do certain things in a certain way in the kitchen. So, in my blog, I attempt to uncover two levels of WHY for the questions I explore around everyday cooking – the first level is what a home cook can relate to. And the second level is what a beginner food-science student would find in their books/resources. For example, in this post on why we do the batter float test for idlis, the home cook can get to know about the right consistency to aim for while grinding idli batter. And the more curious cook can understand about specific gravity and why it matters for the final texture of the idli. Hence the blog’s title: The ‘WHY WHY’ Cook.
Disclaimer, attribution, sharing of my content
I take utmost care in ensuring that my content is reliable and accurate – by backing up my rationale based on research findings, by repeating my experiments to ensure the validity of the takeaways, by verifying secondary information from multiple sources, etc. Still, I am just a beginner in this journey. This blog is just for sharing my learning while I am still learning. So, in case you find any errors, please feel free to point it out through a comment along with the source of the information your explanation is based on. In that case, I would be grateful to make the correction and keep my content up-to-date and accurate!
If you would like to share my content, please feel free to. But ensure that it is attributed to this blog. I will not tolerate plagiarism of any kind – so ensure that you give credit where it is due!
If you have follow-up questions on any post, or if you have requests for other experiments I could do, please drop a comment in that post. Also, if you do your own experiments and have findings that you would like me to incorporate in my writing, do reach out! It’s always more fun to share and learn together 🙂
Hope you enjoy reading and cooking with my blog!
Cheers,
