The Art and Science of Foodpairing: 10,000 flavour matches that will transform the way you eat

From the Introduction:

Some ingredient pairings may appear peculiar at first, but only because we lack prior references. Consider Oaxcan mole negro, an intensely flavorful sauce served with chicken, in which chocolate is a key ingredient. In Japan, China and Korea, red adzuki beans are mashed to a paste, sweetened and turned into various sweet confections and desserts, while Italians drizzle balsamic vinegar over their gelato.

It just goes to show that there is no right or wrong way to pair ingredients. Whether we are comfortable winging it in the kitchen or prefer to stick to recipes, most of the ingredient pairings we encounter are intuitive. That’s not a bad thing, but intuitive pairings are generally limited to familiar combinations, based either on our personal preferences or on classic pairings with some cultural basis. This is why many of us grow bored of our own cooking. But once you look beyond the confines of your own kitchen, you will find an infinite number of potential pairings just waiting to be explored.

Since launching in 2007, Foodpairing has partnered with noted chefs, bartenders and brands from around the globe on some of the most exciting projects ever tasted. In this book, we will guide you through the history and science of Foodpairing and explain why unusual pairings like kiwi and oyster actually work. We will explore the world of aromas and discuss their significance in the role of recipe creation, and how scents are detected and perceived as flavors by our brains. You will learn to use recipe-building tools and gain insights that only the world’s top chefs have had access to until now. This book is designed to inspire food and drink pairings that will surprise, delight and impress.

I began to get very excited about this. Although such technology was used not by chefs but by food companies and chemical manufacturers, I reckoned it would work in the kitchen just as well as the lab. I could use it to find all sorts of wonderful and unexpected flavor pairings, in part because I had already been working with another authoritative source of reference: Steffen Arctander’s book Perfume and Flavor Materials of Natural Origin. By cross-referencing one against the other, I reasoned I could take an ingredient such as [a] cherry, check its constituent compounds and then find other ingredients that shared those compounds and might thus complement it.

And so flavor pairing was born, as much out of my naivety as my curiosity and enthusiasm. For I soon came to realize that the molecular profile of even a single ingredient is so complex that, even if it shares plenty of compounds with another ingredient, it’s far from guaranteed that they will work together.

Foodpairing, therefore, is a wonderful tool for creativity, but only when used in concert with a chef’s intuition, imagination and – above all – emotion. It’s a great starting point but you still need to explore, try things out and, of course, taste constantly."