The Art and Science of Foodpairing: 10,000 Flavour Matches That Will Transform the Way You Eat

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Food pairing makes it easy to discover new ingredient combinations based on their aromatic matches, but that is not all there is to creating tantalizing dishes that will pique your palate. What can you do to take your recipes to the next level? As you make your selections, don’t forget to factor in taste and texture. Balancing the elements of flavor (aroma), taste and texture will add interesting depth and dimension to your dishes. Striking the right balance may sound simple in theory, but it is often the most difficult part of the job when you are in the kitchen. The basics in brief

Foodpairing(R) - What it is, how it works, methodology; the database; how to create a well-balanced recipe. The omnivore's dilemma - Including the conflict between playing safe and boredom, and the search for variety and novelty; learned food association; acquired tastes. Aroma - Including the importance of aroma to our flavor experience; how we change aromas by cooking; how ingredients create different or similar results; building your aroma library. Smell - Including how people smell and perceive aromas; why smell is essential to the eating experience. The Foodpairing(R) directory - 10 pairings per food, 10 per cooking method, 10,000 combinations in total. The book also covers key food characteristics, aroma profiles, classic dishes, contemporary combinations, scientific explanations, special features and contributions from some of the world's greatest chefs for the top 150 ingredients, and much more.For each entry there’s an aroma wheel that is a visual representation of an ingredient’s unique aroma profile. Each wheel comprises two separate rings - an inner ring that displays the 14 different aroma types and an outer one that indicates the concentrations of the available aroma descriptors - such as fruity, floral, herbal, nutty, cheesy, spicy. This is accompanied by a pairing grid that lists 10 potential pairing ingredients followed by further grids that put key pairings under the microscope. To illustrate what we mean by complexity, let’s refer to the chart at right: Types of aromatic complexity. Firefly Books Without getting too carried away, try to incorporate at least two of the five contrasting tastes—sweet, salty, sour, bitter, and umami—to balance your dishes and drinks. In the diagram to the right, the arrows indicate which tastes work to counterbalance one another. Salt, for example, can be used to reduce bitter tastes. That is why some chocolate chip cookie recipes call for a pinch of salt to balance the bitterness of the dark chocolate. Salt also works to balance sweetness, as in sea salt caramel. Following the same principle, you can reduce the intensity of a sweet dessert by adding a sour contrasting element. However, even trained professionals are not good at identifying odors. This book comes to the rescue by naming and cataloguing over 10,000 different food related smells, known as volatile organic compounds. These are then paired to create combinations of ingredients or recipes. As the authors state, “The premise that ingredients that share the same key defining aroma molecules taste good together is the scientific basis of our creative methodology.” I think that the 150 food matrices that IBM's Watson used to group based on the compounds found within each food is interesting. It shows us good pairings and also substitutes. The author, James Briscione, also describes many of the scientific portions of this book well and will remind you that he is not a scientist but a chef. He also includes interesting recipes after each food matrix.

Salty - it's just complementary to everything but sour and bitter (seems wrong to me) (no balancing) A revolutionary new guide to pairing ingredients, based on a famous chef's groundbreaking research into the chemical basis of flavor The next time you’re in creative mode be sure to pull this book off the shelf and read it for inspiration. As an instructor at one of the world’s top culinary schools, James Briscione thought he knew how to mix and match ingredients. Then he met IBM Watson. Working with the supercomputer to turn big data into delicious recipes, Briscione realized that he (like most chefs) knew next to nothing about why different foods taste good together. That epiphany launched him on a quest to understand the molecular basis of flavor—and it led, in time, to The Flavor Matrix . Now, let’s test this on a model ingredient: chopped garlic. An aroma wheel for chopped garlic. Firefly Books Applying the scienceFor this book the authors select 85 ingredients ranging from brie and cassava to doenjang and tequila. They break down each ingredient’s aroma profile and then suggest other ingredients, based on their profiles, to pair with them. You discover why classic, familiar combinations work so well and why surprisingly bizarre ones will, too. White asparagus and vanilla anyone? Or perhaps Chef Heston Blumenthal’s winning combination of chocolate and caviar, now a standard on his restaurant menu. A colored dot indicates the presence of an aroma type within an ingredient, while no colored dot means the aroma type is not present. There is a world of exciting flavour combinations out there and when they work it's incredibly exciting' - Heston Blumenthal Smell - Including how people smell and perceive aromas; why smell is essential to the eating experience.