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Vindaloo

A spicy pork dish marinated in vinegar, curry powder, and garlic, then cooked in mustard oil.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Mustard and garlic match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4,053 recipes. Both carry linalool, which smells floral, citrus. The science ↓

Vindaloo

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the pork

  1. Cut the pork into square pieces, about 2 inches each.

  2. Rinse the pieces in vinegar.

  3. Rub each piece with curry powder and steep in vinegar with salt for 24 hours.

Cook

  1. Heat mustard oil in a copper pan until it produces blue smoke.

  2. Mix curry powder into a paste with vinegar and add to the pan.

  3. Add the meat and the vinegar it was steeped in, and cook.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Mustard + garlictop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together4,053 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

  2. Vinegar + mustardtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together14,067 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Vinegar + garlictop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,115 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

  4. Pork + mustardtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,445 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  5. Pork + garlictop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,169 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-ethyl-2,5-dimethylpyrazine (roasted, nutty).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Pork
Provides the meat that becomes tender and rich as it cooks in the spiced vinegar.
Vinegar
Acidity that tenderizes the pork and carries the flavour of the spices.
Curry powder
Supplies the main spice flavour, and its paste base coats the meat during cooking.
Mustard oil
Fat for frying the spices, adding a pungent, sharp flavour to the dish.
Garlic
Adds pungent aroma and savoury depth to the spiced sauce.

The step that matters

Heating the mustard oil until it produces blue smoke. Oil that is hot enough blooms the spices and mellows their raw taste, while oil that is too hot scorches the curry powder and turns it bitter.

Swap the garlic

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pork, vinegar, mustard):

  1. Tarragonfits better
  2. Capersfits better
  3. Garlicthe original
  4. Allspicefits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against pork, vinegar, mustard. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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