You're listening to Shortwave from NPR.

Hey everybody, this is Shortwave reporter Emily Quang and Shortwave producer Rebecca Ramirez.

And a few weeks ago, we spent a whole evening running some experiments in Rebecca's kitchen

involving food.

So, it's 11.20 at night but we have finished.

We have debittered olive oil. We have made paneer properly.

One thing I didn't do right before.

Experiments inspired by a new cookbook called the Flavor Equation,

The Science of Great Cooking Explained by Nick Sharma.

Nick's a food writer, recipe developer, and appropriately for Shortwave, a molecular biologist.

And even as a kid, cooking has always been a science driven adventure for Nick.

I mean, I think the bulk of my experiments involved chopping plants and putting them into liquids and sing what happened.

But it was just so much fun.

Nick grew up in Mumbai, India, a city hill forever called Bombay.

He learned the basics of cooking from his grandmother, but his culinary style came from tinkering in the kitchen while his parents were at work.

My oldest memory of cooking is I learned how to make rice and just plain rice.

And I really like the smell of roses.

And this was in India. They have this rose syrup that's sweet. It's bright pink.

And I don't think the colors are natural in it. And it's got a really strong rose scent.

So he tipped a little that sweet rose syrup into the rice and the result was...

The most horrific thing in the kitchen.

I remember my mother coming home and saying, very nicely, we will not be doing that again.

...