Flavour paring website - awesome for your cooking.

Ken's picture

Flavour paring can be used to substitute ingredients or put things together in interesting combinations for dishes that you would not have imagined otherwise.

By looking at the component flavour compounds in foodstuffs and finding more than 2 compounds they have in common we can mix them with each other and have them blend and work amazingly well, even when our instincts tells us that would not work, for example chocolate and cooked chicken? Sounds pretty ewwww right? But it works.

This has been something that for the home cook have been out of reach because you need to send shit in for expensive molecular analysis in order to find out what different ingredients have in common. There's a massively expensive database you can buy (20K+ $) that many high end restaurants buy that I have been lusting for, but fuck that price for home use.

Now theres a website with some heavy financial backing that have put a ton of these analysis online into a database format and you just pick from ingredients, the database looks up other ingredients with the same flavour compounds and displays them in a graphical tree showing you what can be mix or substituted.

Seriously, try some weird combos and be amazed that they actually work great together. It's miles of fun freaking out people by serving odd combinations. You also get a lot more mileage out of whatever you have laying around because you find that you can combine things that you normally wouldn't.

It's also fun to see combinations that you have tasted before and see that the reason they go so well together is because of matching flavour compounds. For example Chicken and sesame seeds.

http://www.foodpairing.be/
__________________________
Junk Science|Skeptic Mag|Quack Watch|Bad Science