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If you’re a regular cook at home, then you must know the traditional food items that fill up the palate. Your family must be happy, healthy, and satisfied with the meals you’re preparing every day. However, little do you know the thrill and adventure you experience that varied cuisines bring to your table.
Apart from simply satisfying your taste buds, exploring foods from new cuisines can be an enriching and rewarding experience. It not only broadens your culinary horizons but also opens a door for you to learn about the different cultures they belong to. The Indian culinary world is diverse, from hills to beaches. They provide many mouthwatering recipes and local dishes from across the country. If you are amazed by reading this and want to know the reasons why you should try out a variety of cuisines, her M.A e are the points that you must consider:
Exploring The Culture
Some people like to read books to learn about various cultures across the world, while others through music, travelling and more. This process enhances new learning. Similarly, trying various cuisines from around the world could be a true foodie’s way of exploring various cultures. Be it through travels or international dining experiences at restaurants in their own city, foodies can gain insights into the geography and cultures of various countries across the world through their culinary traditions. For instance, if you tried Japanese tea and liked it, it would help you understand the importance of the Japanese tea ceremonies, which is a big part of the Japanese culture. Thus, a true foodie can learn a lot about other country’s cultures through the authentic cuisines of the land more than they would through Netflix documentaries or novels.
Broaden Your Palate
As a foodie, one will perpetually be on the lookout to try something new to taste apart from what they already have. Some foods, like the durian fruit from Thailand or the prized Russian caviar, can be pungent for many people’s palates, but if you have not tried it ever before in life, tasting this unusual fruit is an adventure and a new learning experience that food enthusiasts normally look forward to experiencing. They may enjoy the pungent flavours and durian can become the most exotic fruit that they have tasted, or they may develop an aversion to the strong smell and may never want to try it again. But keeping an open mind, the curiosity and interest alive to try new ingredients, dishes and cuisines must be on every foodie’s agenda as it challenges their palate preferences and refines their taste that’s constantly evolving while broadening knowledge about the produce that grows across the world.
Diverse Nutrition To Balance Your Diet
The concept of food is different across the world. There are so many foods that grow in different climatic conditions and are native to certain places but have high nutritional value that we may or may not be aware of. Exploring different cuisines will help you incorporate several nutrient-rich foods into your diet that you probably never knew existed before you tried them on your travels.
Different cuisines make use of various ingredients based on the produce grown locally and with different cooking techniques. But if that aspect were explored, we could design better foods with a mix of different ingredients to form a balanced diet routine for ourselves. For instance, as Indians, we may be aware of the high nutritional value of millets like ragi, foxtail millet, and more in comparison to western countries like the USA, Europe, etc.
At the same time, we might not be aware of foods from those countries, like artichokes, heart of palm, macadamia nuts, pecan nuts, and more, or the high nutritional value they possess. But, when we explore and learn, we can make a salad with millets, artichokes, pecan nuts, etc. to better incorporate nutrition into our diets, balancing it on-the-go as per our requirements.
Keeps The Interest For Home Cooking Alive
Generally, when you’re cooking at home, either you cook the age-old recipes you learned from your mother or the ones from the local area. Experimenting with cuisines and learning about various culinary cultures as a foodie will enable you to add creativity to your cooking skills and motivate you to innovate and create delicious fusion dishes of your own that may not surface on restaurant menus in common. This will help you opt for limitless opportunities for culinary experiments and the process will help you discover new ingredients, cooking techniques and flavours.
Connect Cultures Through Cuisine
It is most common knowledge that food and festivities bring people from different cultures and communities together, just like music does or conversations do. Sharing a meal with others helps you form bonds and create meaningful connections beyond boundaries and language barriers. Food can become a language of its own to help communicate with people when you travel to a land where conversations may seem beyond comprehension.
People anywhere in the world tend to develop a sense of pride towards the land they live in, the food they eat and the air they breathe. This makes it easy for travellers to connect with local people over their food with an open mind to explore and learn more about the land's people and culture through their food to make it their own even after they return to their respective cities or homes.
For instance, travelling to Mexico as an Indian and trying the tamales, diverse tacos, guacamole, churros, grilled meat and more might give you an insight into the Mexican people's culture and lifestyle, as well as ideas to fuse some of their culinary techniques and ideas into your own Indian cuisine, connecting cultures and making your own simultaneously. Rajma-chawal may be a classic combination in India, but the bean or chilli gravy in the Mexican chimichanga on top of pan-fried tacos has a charm of its own. And probably that's how dishes like Mexican chaat at a famous shop near a popular college in Bengaluru were created too.
Inspire Friends, Family And Loved Ones
Travelling places, learning about the place's culture through their food and learning how to cook like them is a skill you earn while you learn life lessons on-the-go when you travel. Sharing the knowledge with friends and families when you return and recreating those meals for them back at home is not only creating fond memories but also helping them understand and appreciate the world and different cultures in the same manner that you do.
The new dishes that adorn the lunch or dinner table afterward become a gift of unique experiences that you present them with, which can help them broaden their knowledge and palates while being proud of you for inspiring them to try something new. For instance, if you travelled to Thailand and attended a cooking class there, you might learn how to make the different curries, soups, pad Thai, and coconut pancakes, which may have been the best dishes that you tried and enjoyed during your visit.
With the newly learned skills, you can go ahead and invite your friends and family for lunch or dinner and prepare these new dishes for them to try, which are completely different from the roti-sabzi-chaawal-dal meal that they are familiar with otherwise. It might also inspire them to create their own versions of pad Thai or khao-soi in their kitchens while they remember you for introducing them to something so new.
