British chef Heston Blumenthal is credited with originating the “food pairing hypothesis” which posits that foods that form pleasing flavor combinations — from strawberries and chocolate to the more unexpected caviar and white chocolate — do so because they share numerous chemical compounds responsible for flavor. A study published in Scientific Reports examines this hypothesis, concluding that for some cuisines it holds true, including North American and Western European food, but that for others, including East Asian food, it is false. The researchers examined the relationships between individual ingredients with the techniques of network theory, which is often used to investigate the organization of complex systems. “It’s really natural to think in terms of networks because the food pairing hypothesis is really about making connections between different ingredients,” said Yong-Yeol Ahn, a statistical physicist at the University of Indiana in Bloomington and a member of the research team. Flavor is a crucial element of food pairing. But what is it? Flavor is different than taste. The tongue recognizes tastes — the familiar sensations of salty, sour, bitter and sweet, as well as savoriness, called umami. Flavor encompasses much more of the sensory experience of eating. “Eighty percent of our eating experience is determined by the nose,” said Bernard Lahousse, the science director of Sense For Taste, a research company that supplies information to chefs, bartenders and food companies. Rounding out the eating experience are texture, sound, and more. Although scientists understand some of the basics, much mystery remains. “Odor is fascinating,” said Jeff Potter, the author of “Cooking for Geeks”. Whereas taste is simple to describe … We have a hypothesis for a model of how we think our nose smells things.” The Experiment To find out what foods people actually enjoy in combination, Ahn and his team went online. With the 56,000 recipes they gathered from three databases, two in English and one in Korean, they began building their analysis of the food pairing hypothesis. The researchers compared the combinations found in the recipes to a flavor network they created based on the presence of flavor compounds in different ingredients. The comparison revealed the relative popularity of different food combinations and enabled them to compare the tendencies employed by different cuisines . This “Food Pairing Tree” displays several of the foods whose flavors most closely align with the flavors of lobster. Credit: