Guests enjoy turkey, peanut and chocolate main courses and test ‘flavor bridging’ theory
david stock
Some foods are made for each other. From the comforting combination of mozzarella, tomato, and marjoram on pizza to the enchanting trinity of ginger, garlic, and soy sauce that makes East Asian cuisine so natural, some combinations are so natural that you could live without them. It’s so hard to imagine. But for centuries, gourmets and scholars have been puzzled as to why some foods go together so well.
In 1992, with chef Heston Blumenthal. Francois Benge Let’s go to the laboratory to solve the mystery of this dish. They came up with the idea that foods that taste good together also share many volatile flavor compounds, chemicals that carry aromas that rise to the back of the nose and create flavor perception on the tongue. Their findings were validated in 2011 with the following study: Analyzed 56,498 recipes from various world cuisines.
Yongyeol Ang and his colleagues at Indiana University used that data to build a network model, a complex map that shows the relationships between all the ingredients in a recipe and the flavor compounds they share. This confirms that North American and Western European recipes tend to combine ingredients that share flavor components.
The “Flavor Pairing Theory” has revolutionized the world of cooking. food manufacturer Investing resources to apply that idea to a product, startup companies Leverage open source data on flavor compounds to predict the next big…
Source: www.newscientist.com
