Mix Hakka Noodles, dosa and Michelin, and what do you get?

At Gaggan, voted Asia’s Best Restaurant for four years in a row, the signature dish is called Yogurt Explosion. Visitors to the two Michelin-starred Bangkok restaurant are always taken by surprise when they first see it. The dish consists of an oval shaped dollop of yogurt in a silver spoon.

The magic begins when the yogurt enters your mouth. It turns out that it is not an ordinary blob of yogurt at all, but a little fully formed pillow, with a delicate membrane which bursts on contact with the heat of your mouth. Once the yogurt pillow explodes, it hits your palate with a burst of sweet, sour, spicy and savoury flavours.

For most foreigners, the dish is a marvel of technique (it is made using a molecular cuisine technology called “spherification”) and, of course, the flavours are delicious.

For Indians, however, the dish evokes a very specific taste memory: paapri chaat. This is a street food staple in North India made from deep-fried sheets of flour, yogurt and spicy chutneys. Within the trade, where the name Yogurt Explosion seems a little fancy, Indian chefs simply call it a Paapri Chaat sphere.

Anand invented the dish seven years ago after working with the Adria brothers of El Bulli in Spain and it is now the defining dish of modern Indian cuisine. Most Indian restaurants, where the chef understands the technique of molecular gastronomy, will offer some variation of Gaggan’s dish. And Gaggan himself jokes that the Yogurt Explosion is the dish that made him rich.

But here’s what I find interesting: the defining dish of modern Indian cuisine is not a variation on some haute cuisine speciality or even, a riff on home cooking.