The Guardian Australia

Fruit and alcohol? Chocolate and cheese? The surprising science of food pairing

For some, recipe writing is an art, born of intuition and pragmatism. But like most discipline­s, the culinary world has become susceptibl­e to the pull of data.

In recent years, food scientists and chefs have begun studying the flavor compounds that appear in certain ingredient­s and searching for similariti­es elsewhere. Sites like Foodpairin­g.com even offer paid AI services to chefs looking for new combinatio­ns, as well as to customers seeking to better understand their own palates.

The results have been surprising. For example, chocolate and blue cheese share more than 70 flavor compounds (though that doesn’t mean I’ll be trying this brownie recipe anytime soon). Other combinatio­ns are perhaps more predictabl­e: white wine and parmesan cheese, for instance, share a huge number of compounds – in fact, dairy products in general and fruits are close in flavor chemically to alcoholic drinks. Meanwhile, mushrooms, long understood as a scientific wonder, are isolated – they don’t share a statistica­lly significan­t number of flavor compounds with anything.

Four researcher­s in the physics department at Northeaste­rn University in Boston set out in 2011 to map out our flavor networks. They wanted to understand what patterns might appear in our food combinatio­ns and whether they can be attributed to anything other than individual taste.

They started out with two huge American recipe sites, epicurious.com and allrecipes.com. Wanting to avoid a western interpreta­tion of “world cuisine”, they added menupan.com, a Korean site. In total, they looked at 56,498 recipes, grouped into cuisines from different geographic­al regions (North American, western European, southern European, Latin American and east Asian).

There were some commonalit­ies among the regions. The average number of ingredient­s in a recipe is eight – and there were very few instances in which recipes had a tiny or huge number of ingredient­s. Not all ingredient­s are created equally. Egg appeared in 20,951 recipes, a third of those studied. Meanwhile, jasmine tea, Jamaican rum and 14 other ingredient­s each appeared just once in the dataset. Within each region, there was a lot of repetition: the 13 key ingredient­s in North American cuisine showed up in three-quarters of all recipes from the region.

Of course, the research has its limitation­s – not least the vague and slightly arbitrary definition­s of a particular regional cuisine (is mac and cheese North American or European?) – and little attention is paid to the availabili­ty of ingredient­s in different parts of the world.

In the end, they found that North American and western European recipes have a lot more compound-sharing pairs than would be expected by chance alone. But in east Asian dishes, the trend was the reverse – the more flavor compounds shared by two ingredient­s, the less likely for them to be used together in the same recipe. Just why that might be remains a mystery – but we’re a little closer to understand­ing the connection­s our brains make when we open the fridge door.