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The Flavor Matrix: The Art and Science of Pairing Common Ingredients to Create Extraordinary Dishes?
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Go buy this book from Amazon. It is AMAZING if you are looking for food pairings that scientifically taste great.
Disclaimer: I have no association or affiliation with the author other than buying his book. I learned about it from Kenji @seriouseats.
I'm not a pro but I live with one who has been pushing me to stretch myself.
Buy cookbooks written by professional chefs. Study them, cook from them a lot, follow new recipes exactly at least once before you start messing with them.
A pro typically cares more about mastering a technique than following a recipe. For example, last week we had a whole chicken that I wanted to roast low and slow. The recipe I was working with said to spatchcock the chicken and roast it for 2.5 hours at 325F, but I started cooking late in the day and wanted to speed it up, so we cut it into 6 pieces - breasts, legs, thighs - and it was done roasting in about an hour. I knew it would work because I have enough experience roasting a cut-up chicken at different temperatures to be sure. Trying a lot of different recipes for roast chicken gives you a chance to study, develop your intuition as a cook, and deviate from a recipe with confidence. Fundamental techniques like roasting, braising and stewing, making the French mother sauces, stir frying and pan frying, etc, are infinitely adaptable once you've done it enough to have a template memorized.
The other main thing is getting confident with experimenting with flavor. I'm still working on this, and there's a lot of ways you can build your confidence. One is to pick up a couple of cookbooks that focus on exploring the technique of building flavor, like Ottolenghi's Flavor or The Flavor Matrix. You could take a deep dive into an ethnic cuisine to get familiar with flavors typical to that region. Or, you could pick a spice or condiment and challenge yourself to cook with it as much as possible for a couple of weeks to force yourself to get familiar with it. On the savory side, soups are a VERY forgiving vehicle for flavor experiments, and on the baking side, I'd say scones and ice creams have been the easiest for me to mess around with.
If text is the only information given to it, definitely.
However, you could frame it differently. There's a book called The Flavor Matrix where the author essentially looked at pairings of foods and the common 'pairs' that go beyond basic ingredients - each recipe was encoded w/ info about the chemical composition, 'flavinoids', and impressions of the output taste (what 'flavinoids' are is somewhat subjective but seems to represent at least a good starting point to compare flavor profiles). His analysis was to essentially compile this information, then look at overlaps of commonly paired items, and look for unexpected 'good' pairings (i.e. things that are not traditionally paired, like strawberry and mushroom or coffee and carrot).
What the author essentially did is 'human learning' rather than machine learning - he looked at the overlapping pairs based on the statistics but then analyzed them himself and did the final step himself (recipe creation i.e. measurements and cooking methods).
Another way to approach the above problem would be to use existing recipes as a training data set as the author did, then test it against a set of ingredients that are used a certain way, then letting it run autonomously, and finally picking out only the output recipes that don't previously exist in the database.
May I point you toward <em>The Flavor Matrix</em>
Funny that the only replies to this are coming years after your post, but I also found this by googling “lime and cinnamon”.
I work in a bar and whenever I have to differentiate between lime and lemon juice I look for a very distinct cinnamon note in the smell. I haven’t had a chance to look up this particular relation yet, but I have this book that chemically breaks down the composition of certain ingredients to scientifically analyze how smells/flavors mix together. If you’re into the science of these things, you might find it interesting. https://www.amazon.com/Flavor-Matrix-Science-Ingredients-Extraordinary/dp/0544809963
Guessing they meant this: https://www.amazon.com/Flavor-Matrix-Science-Ingredients-Extraordinary/dp/0544809963
The Institute of Culinary Education and IBM already beat you to that one https://www.amazon.com.au/Flavor-Matrix-Science-Ingredients-Extraordinary/dp/0544809963/ref=mp_s_a_1_3
Couple books that might be worth looking at!
Flavor Thesaurus: https://www.amazon.com/Flavour-Thesaurus-Niki-Segnit/dp/0747599777/ref=mp_s_a_1_5?dchild=1&keywords=flavor+wheel&qid=1617294576&sr=8-5
The Flavor Bible gets a lot of attention, but I'd highly recommend The Flavor Matrix instead. The Flavor Bible is a list of ingredients that pair well, and while extensive, isn't a practical guide of any sort, no recipes, more for random inspiring of ideas. The Flavor Matrix tells you HOW to make flavors go together, why they work, with fun example recipes.
If you need more about preparation technique, anything Cook's Illustrated is a good idea, tons of cookbooks from them you can find at libraries and thrift stores. Serious Eats does a fantastic job of understanding the 'why' behind recipes. Or with a CIA textbook, you can essentially put yourself through cooking school.
That said, there's a lot to be said for raw experience. The best resource for making good food for yourself is your own tongue and nose. Challenge yourself to take a head of broccoli, and with whatever way you see fit, try and make it taste good. Being a good cook requires you to pay full attention to what you're tasting. Like art theory, there are guidelines and traditions, but often what makes something work is taking established ideas and building on them with your own flavor, so to speak.
Hello enemonsieur,
There was a paper nearly a decade ago that was working to create a more robust concept than food pairing, and developed what they called food flavor networks or links:
https://www.technologyreview.com/2011/11/29/189470/flavour-networks-shatter-food-pairing-hypothesis/
If you can get access to it via Sci-Hub (reference is at the end of the article), there are some very interesting ways to pair flavors. I’m not sure how much they did on fruits, but I do remember seeing a few vegetables in there. That’s about the most rigorous form of flavor “connecting” that I’ve seen.
You can also look into flavor pairing as a more simple theory for flavors:
https://www.foodpairing.com/en/science-behind
https://www.amazon.com/Flavor-Matrix-Science-Ingredients-Extraordinary/dp/0544809963/
https://www.amazon.com/Art-Science-Foodpairing-Peter-Coucquyt/dp/0228100844
The idea behind flavor pairing is that foods with high overlap of the same flavor compounds in their flavor profile are more like to pair than foods that do not. So the authors were able to generate a large matrix of unusual flavor pairings of ingredients by analyzing and overlapping their flavor composition.
I hope this helps!
You can check out the source material used in creation of the infographic. https://www.nature.com/articles/srep00196 Of course the authors there note that the information web is so dense that it is difficult to visualize effectively.
The designer that created the infographic also consulted on this book: https://www.amazon.com/Flavor-Matrix-Science-Ingredients-Extraordinary/dp/0544809963
If you want to try unusual or new combinations I can recommend The Flavor Matrix which shows combinations based on the similarity of the aroma molecules.
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