The Science of Onion and Garlic

Most dishes from the Indian subcontinent begin with a hot pan, fat, whole spices and some combination of Alliums - the family of plants that give us onion/shallots and garlic. These sulphurous flavour-powerhouses are intensely pungent, a characteristic that puritanical types over history have termed "Tamasik" and deprived scores of people of the incredible flavour alliums bring to any dish. Elaborate mythologies have been written to both justify and prevent its consumption. Unlike spices, they don't just add aroma, they also bring complex sweetness to the dishes that feature them. And even when people avoid them for religious reasons, they indulge in some wholesale chemical cheating by replacing them with asafoetida, which contains sulphurous flavour molecules very similar to the ones in onion and garlic. This video covers a range of common garlic and onion-related doubts and also touches upon a larger fascinating tidbit about the life of plants in general.