I've been working on digital foodpairing and recipe generation for 7 years in a startup we founded in Copenhagen and I'd like to share some of the things I found interesting.
tldr;
The most prominent foodpairing theory[1] based on aromatic compounds is blatantly simplistic. I made word-embeddings from ingredients to show you that there are other aspects of much more importance and I hypothesise what those might be.
What is Flavour
I want to differentiate taste and flavour. There are 5 dimensions to taste: salty, sweet, bitter, sour and umami. In addition to that there are many more aromatic chemicals. The VCF (volatile compounds in food) database contains over 7k at the moment.[2] What I would like to... (read 1374 more words →)
Hey VM, I'm seriously interested in what happened in your head back then. I'm trying to make sense of my own experience from last year's lockdown and this is the first time I read something that reminds me of it. Can I please ask you a few things before I share my own experience?
1. Was your experience gradual?
2. Did it have a clear culmination and then a stop, or did it pass away slowly?
3. Were there any recurrent themes to your thought, or did they feel random?
You can't even begin to imagine the waking heavens and hells that start unfolding inside your skull. At times I just wanted to curl up in... (read more)
History is a huge part of it for sure! Take onion and garlic for example. They used to be the only umami ingredients you could grow throughout Europe and they've got plenty of sugar (compare apple's ~13g of carbs to onion at ~9 and garlic at ~30!). Since fruit was not available nearly as much as now, the alliums were one of the most nutritious foods you'd find. That's why it's SO prevalent in Western cuisine, but not nearly as much in others, especially when you look South.
The open-mindedness is another spot on, because your perception of flavour is afaik the only of the 5 basic senses that gets altered by memory... (read more)