There's a reason why Asian dishes often taste so different from the typical North American fare: North American recipes rely on flavors that are related, while East Asian cooks go for sharp contrasts.
That's the word from researchers at the University of Cambridge, who used a tool called network analysis to chart the relationship between chemical flavor compounds. They did it to test the widely believed notion that foods with compatible flavors are chemically similar.
It turns out that's true in some regional cuisines, particularly in North America – think milk, egg, butter, cocoa, and vanilla. But in East Asia, cooks are more likely to combine foods with few chemical similarities – from shrimp to lemon to ginger, soy sauce, and hot peppers.
The scientists used 56,498 recipes to test their questions about "the "rules' that may underlie" recipes. (They mined Epicurious and Allrecipes as well as the Korean site Menupan.) They note that we rely on a very small number of recipes — around a one million — compared with all the possible food and flavor combinations available to us — more than a trillion by their estimates.
To read the rest of the story, please go to: NPR
