Section:GDN 12 PaGe:7 Edition Date:190829 Edition:01 Zone: Sent at 28/8/2019 17:00 cYanmaGentaYellowbla

The Guardian
Thursday 29 August 2019 7

If you have ever omitted

to chill your beer, then shoved four

cans in the freezer only to forg et

about the last one and watch it

perish; if you have ever been to a

festival and ordered white wine,

forgetting that festivals never cool it

properly, and had to neck something

that tasted like a day-old Lemsip;

if you have ever wondered why

mojitos in a can are so damn tasty

that even members of the shadow

cabinet drink them, physics has the

answer. Specifi cally, two Warsaw-

based physicists, Álvaro Díez and

Tibor Pal, who have devised a

chilled drinks calculator (you can

fi nd it at omnicalculator.com/food/

chilled-drink). You provide basic

information – what the drink is,

what container it is in , how much

of it there is , where it was before

you started chilling it, whether it

is going in the fridge or the freezer,

what temperature you want to drink

it at – and the calculator will tell you

how long that will take, to within a

minute’s accuracy.

The fi rst thing you should know is

that it takes longer than you think. A

half-litre of water in a plastic bottle

will take 77 minutes, and that is only

to get from 30C down to 6C (in water

terms, “refreshing”). The second

Make mine

a cold one

Zoe Williams

PHOTOGRAPHS: GETTY/ISTOCKPHOTO; A WONG; CHRISTOPHER THOMOND/THE GUARDIAN

India

Mayur Patel, the
co-owner of the
northern Bundobust
restaurants, insists
the Gujarati food he grew up on is
“simpler than it’s made out. All the
ingredients are available in Asian
supermarkets everywhere and we
don’t use dozens of spices. It’s more
about how you combine them – say,
adding the garam masala at the
beginning or end, which creates
completely diff erent fl avours.”
You do not need to understand
the Ayurvedic roots of meat-free
Hindu cooking (certain “hot” foods
are thought to dangerously excite
the senses, yet fresh green chillies
are somehow “calming”) to get to
grips with Patel’s beloved dhal baht ,
“like Indian gravy that you add to
rice”, or bataka shak , a dry-fried
potato curry. Instead, you need to
stock up on seasonings (mustard
seeds, fenugreek, coriander powder,
cumin, asafoetida and curry leaves),
buy a pressure cooker to speed up all
those lentils you will be cooking and,
importantly, perfect your tempering
to either start a curry or fi nish one
with a fl ourish.
“Starting by tempering oil with
fenugreek seeds, mustard seeds
and ground onion is fundamental.
That gives you that savoury, jammy,
umami fl avour, like Marmite. Then,
as you add fresh ingredients – green
beans, aubergines, potato – you
get diff erent textures coming out.
Okra, for instance, really thickens
the base. It’s like making a cocktail,
combining and blending vegetables.
I think that gives you more creative
space than basing a dish on one
simple protein.”
It is a learning process. But you
have Google and a head start, in that
most Britons are familiar with the
fl avours of Indian food, if not the
vast hinterland of Indian regional
or even Gujarati cooking. Patel, for
instance, is obsessed by his mum’s
khandvi, pillowy pasta-like rolls
made with gram fl our and yoghurt.

The fi rst thing you

should know is

that it takes longer

than you think. A

half-litre of water

in plastic takes 77

minutes to chill

Pal, meanwhile, is transfi xed by

hydration and has calculated that,

for maximum quench, you need to

drink your water at 16C , which is

surprisingly warm.

Mostly speaking, says Díez, “if

you want to really enjoy the taste,

you have to have most things

lukewarm or slightly below room

temperature. Otherwise you don’t

get all the fl avours into your mouth.”

Don’t forget that when drinks

people say “room temperature”,

particularly old-fashioned drinks

people, they are talking about rooms

as they were in Victorian times,

16-18C , not the 21C most of us would

think of.

The more emphatic the taste

of a thing, the warmer you should

drink it; so red wine and brandy are

best at 15-18C. If I can add a limit

to this wisdom from a layperson’s

perspective, my dad used to buy red

wine that was incredibly bad , then

add boiling water to warm it up,

making it taste less of itself. There is

such a thing as too hot, unless your

wine is rubbish to start with.

Champagne, as I am sure you

know, should be colder than other

white wines, but not that much

colder: 8-10C. Basically the only

drink that should be as cold as you

think is lager, which is best at 6-8C.

But that is because “most of the

time, people aren’t drinking them

for their amazing taste – they just

want something refreshing that isn’t

water”, Díez remarks with authority.

I am almost fully persuaded that it

is a waste of throat (as they say in

the trade) to drink lager for thirst-

quenching purposes. You should

drink water until you are no longer

thirsty, then alcohol.

T heir main surprise fi nding was

how much diff erence the container

made: drinks in glass take more

than twice as long to chill as those in

cans. On the plus side, “it insulates

the drink very well, so it’s much

better if you’re moving drinks from

one place to another”.

Beyond that, your freezer is not

really designed to cool things down.

It is designed to keep things cool. If

you put two bottles of wine in there,

its temperature will go up faster

than that of the bottles will go down.

Possibly the most important take-

home is that if you have anything

you know you want to drink cold,

store it in a cool place to begin with,

so it has less far to travel.

The researchers drink red wine

for preference now, because it is

quite hard to get that wrong. And

if the main problem with water is

that it doesn’t taste of enough, there

are better answers to that – slices

of lemon, sprigs of mint – than just

drinking lager.

It feels as if lager’s days might

be numbered.

Serial chillers T wo scientists have nailed

cooling drinks properly. No more warm

beer or room-temperature white wine

thing you should know is that

drinks operate at a delicate balance.

If white wine and rosé aren’t cold

enough, the alcohol starts to

dominate, which it is meant to do in

a red wine, but is harsh in a white.

For most whites, 9-13C is optimal ;

any colder, and you will start to lose

the fl avour altogether and taste

only coldness. For white wines with

very high sugar – dessert wines,

basically, and white port – the band

is narrower: 10-12C.

What kind of person obsesses

about all this? Díez, 27, is doing

a masters on the mathematical

computer modelling of physical

phenomena. His passion is to apply

physics to anything that crosses his

path; in his room (I haven’t seen this,

only heard it described), everything

is stacked in boxes that are exactly

the size of the thing they contain.

Greece: “The
Orthodox tradition
of [meat and dairy-
free] fasting is
strong here ,” says Heather Thomas,
the author of The Greek Vegetarian
Cookbook (£24.95, Phaidon). “True
believers abstain for several months
each year. S ome of Greece’s best-
loved dishes evolved from fasting:
dolmadakia vine leaf parcels, Lenten
spinach “risotto ” spanakorizo and
many stews like gigantes.”

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