Which flavours work well together, and why

Remember Letitia Cropley, the ‘Queen of Cordon Bleugh’ in TV series The Vicar of Dibley? She served up unusual food combinations such as Marmite cakes, lemon curd with ham and cheese, and a bewildering concoction of chocolate with cod’s roe. She may have benefited from new research that increases understanding of which flavours work well together, and why.

New flavour combinations are always being sought, and recent research is taking the science of combining ingredients to a computable level. The research, published in Frontiers in ICT, suggests and analyses a possible new principle behind ingredient mixing in traditional cuisines — the food-bridging hypothesis — and compares it to the previously suggested foodpairing hypothesis, in order to examine what data-driven graphical modelling can tell us about tasty ingredient combinations.

The foodpairing hypothesis was first suggested by chef Heston Blumenthal and his friend François Benzi, when Blumenthal famously discovered the surprisingly delicious combination of caviar and white chocolate. “The food-pairing hypothesis suggests that if two ingredients share important flavour compounds, there is a good chance that they will result in a tasty combination,” explained Dr Tiago Simas from the University of Cambridge, UK.

“In our article, we suggest and analyse a new hypothesis: food-bridging. It is different from foodpairing and opens the possibility of better understanding possible mechanisms behind mixing ingredients in a recipe. Whereas foodpairing intensifies flavour by combining ingredients with similar chemical compounds, food-bridging smoothes the contrast between the ingredients.”

In their study, the research team analysed food-bridging and compared it to foodpairing by creating a graphical model using data from seven different traditional cuisines. The model consists of a flavour network that relates 1530 ingredients with 1106 flavours, and shows how ingredients are related to each other according to the flavour compounds they have in common (foodpairing), and what is the shortest connection — or bridge — via one or more additional ingredients between two food types that have a low affinity (food-bridging).

The study found that the flavour network was 72,6% semi-metric, meaning that there were a lot of possible paths to combine ingredients without a strong direct flavour affinity.

The researchers also found clear regional clusters that could be divided up in four classes depending on how food-bridging and foodpairing are, or aren’t, used in the different traditional cuisines included in the study:

1. Low foodpairing + low food-bridging: East Asian cuisines, which tend to use contrasted ingredients with respect to flavour, which results in a cuisine that contrasts several flavours.
2. Low foodpairing + high food-bridging: Southeast Asian cuisines. While these cuisines are similar to East Asian cuisines with respect to foodpairing since contrasted ingredients are used, they also smooth these contrasts to a larger extent with other ingredients that bridge the contrasts.
3. High foodpairing + low food-bridging: Southern, Eastern and Western European, as well as the North American cuisines. These cuisines tend to follow foodpairing with the direct intensification of flavours in a recipe, while avoiding contrasted ingredients.
4. High foodpairing + high food-bridging: Latin American cuisines, which tend to reinforce the intensity of flavour using both foodpairing and food-bridging. In other words, these cuisines use both direct and indirect intensification of flavours in a recipe, reinforcing common flavours and smoothing contrasts between flavoured contrasted ingredients.

“We may suggest several explanations for why, in this analysis, traditional cuisines cluster in this way,” noted Dr Simas. “The clustering aligns well with a geopolitical distribution. These cuisines may be driven by particular geographical weather and resource constrains as well as political trade in goods, which may influence the different styles of cuisine analysed in our study.

“In general, we may observe [in] these results that there is a dichotomy, with ingredients that are less suited to foodpairing tending to use the food-bridging mechanism and vice versa. Foodpairing and food-bridging are different hypotheses that may describe possible mechanisms behind the recipes of traditional cuisines.”

These results bring a new, more nuanced perspective on foodpairing and introduce food-bridging as a new principle behind cooking and flavour mixing. Moreover, the mathematical representation of food-bridging — semi-metricity — could also be applied to other aspects of cooking, such as texture and colour, to make scientifically driven predictions about successful ingredient combinations. Bringing data analysis into the kitchen might just be the thing to make cooking and ingredient mixing feel like a piece of cake.