Like water for mushroom

Krish Ashok is a techie who occasionally indulges in making music, cooking food, internet memes and blogging

Illustration by Saksham Arora

It was recently when I was loudly slurping a bowl of Ramen in complete adherence with Japanese social etiquette that I asked myself the question — What connects human breast milk and mushrooms? It is precisely because I am able to contrive such questions that this respected newspaper has given me the (paid) opportunity to inflict said questions and its rambling answers upon you, the unsuspecting reader.

But before we get to the connection between fleshy, spore-bearing fungus and the nutrient rich product of mammalian udders, I’d like to start by pointing out that mushroom is called Kaalaan by Tamil people who eat it, and Naai Kudai (or dog’s umbrella) by the small minority of irrational vegetarians, who have deemed it to be not ‘planty’ enough for their diets. This is rather silly for two reasons. One — mushrooms would make for rather inefficient umbrellas even for the smallest-sized dogs, so the metaphor lacks a basic foundation in reality. And two — mushrooms are insanely delicious. You might say, come on, it’s just a funny metaphor intended to impart a snarky inedibility to the fungus, but I’d say that given the 2000-year-old poetic tradition — with the most astonishingly accurate nature metaphors that are abound in Sangam-era Tamil poetry — dog’s umbrella is frankly an embarrassment.

But let’s get back to the mushroom. The reason (non-poisonous) mushrooms are so delicious is because they evoke what the Japanese call the fifth basic sense of taste — umami. This is in addition to sweet, salty, bitter and sour, and describes a savoury and brothy sensation that one gets when eating mushrooms, or tomatoes, parmesan cheese and

hakka noodles from the van parked outside Anna Nagar Tower Park. Scientists have figured out that umami comes from the presence of glutamates, which are salts of glutamic acid — an amino acid that is one of the building blocks of proteins in the human body.

It also turns out that almost everyone is likely cooking mushrooms the wrong way. If you sauté them in oil, you will notice that they absorb almost all of the oil, no matter how much you use. This is because mushrooms are made of a network of fibres that have lots of air pockets in them and oil will keep collecting inside them till they are all filled up. This is why most home cooks end up with greasy mushrooms. The food science trick here is to first add a few tablespoons of water to the pan in which you are sautéing mushrooms. This will ensure that water fills those air gaps first. After that, a few teaspoons of oil will ensure that all of the fat is used to perfectly brown the outsides of the mushroom and doesn’t end up collecting inside those air bubbles.

That brings us to the Tower Park hakka noodles — which is delicious because the cook adds Monosodium Glutamate (or MSG) — a synthetic version of the exact same thing that makes mushrooms and shrimps delicious. Unfortunately, a lot of people wrongly believe that MSG is bad for health. It isn’t, because guess what else contains glutamates in large amounts? Yep. Human breast milk.