A study published yesterday by Indiana University got into the nitty-gritty of how recipes work. The most interesting insight? Western recipes tend to mix ingredients that have flavor chemicals in common, while East Asian recipes tend to combine ingredients that taste totally different from each other. Or, in slightly more technical terms:
The idea that different cultures have different ideas of how to blend flavors is a pretty interesting way to explain how they've developed. So researchers took 56,498 online recipes (from Epicurious, Allrecipes, and Menupan, a Korean website), broke down the ingredient lists, and then cross-referenced them with a database of flavor compounds, checking for overlap. The image above, which they're calling a "Flavor Backbone," is the result of that work. The color of each ingredient circle indicates what type of food it is, the size indicates how often that ingredient pops up in recipes, and the thickness of the lines connecting them shows how many flavor compounds it has common with other ingredients.
Something we didn't need a chart to tell us: the strong the connection between beer and blue cheese. But it's nice to have proof that our late-night cravings make scientific sense.
[Indiana University via Eurekalert]