Tikalon Blog by Dev Gualtieri

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Flavor Networks

December 2, 2011

My longtime employer nicely provided a fitness center for its employees. Mid-day, I would exercise on a treadmill while watching television . Since daytime television is uniformly awful, I eventually settled on watching the Food Network . My exercise time coincided with a show about desserts hosted by Debbi Fields of the famous Mrs. Fields cookies.

In watching that show, I saw that most of the dessert recipes contained a set of common ingredients , such as flour , sugar , butter , oil , milk and eggs . To make a new recipe, you just needed to vary the proportions of these and add a pinch of some other ingredients, such as cinnamon , vanilla , or chocolate .

If I had been adventuresome, I would have written a computer program to randomly generate dessert recipes, baked them up, and seen how they tasted. It would have been a Monte Carlo calculation , with ingredient distributions derived from existing recipes. Alas, all this eating would have been contrary to the idea of my being at the fitness center in the first place.

No scientific idea is lost forever. It's generally rediscovered by another scientist . An eclectic group of scientists from the Department of Physics , Northeastern University (Boston, MA), the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute , Harvard University (Boston, MA), the School of Informatics and Computing , Indiana University (Bloomington, IN), and the Cavendish Laboratory , Cambridge University (Cambridge, UK) has recently published a paper on the arXiv Preprint Server that analyzes the connections between food ingredients in western and non-western foods.

The number of potential food recipes is huge. If a typical recipe has just eight ingredients, there would be about 10¹⁵ possible combinations using the 300 most common ingredients. The authors point out that this could still be an underestimate, since one authoritative source lists 1,000 ingredients,[2] and there could be ten ingredients per recipe, for a total of 10²³ combinations. Obviously, humans are exploiting just a small fraction of the "culinary space," although most of these combinations would be quite unpalatable.

The authors find that western cuisines use ingredient pairs that share many flavor compounds . This finding supports what's called the "food pairing " hypothesis that some foods seem to naturally go together. A strange example of this is the discovery that chocolate and cauliflower taste good together.[3] East Asian cuisines , however, avoid such flavor pairing.

So, what ingredients are used most often? The following table shows the most popular food ingredients for North American and East Asian cuisine.

Contributing ingredients to North American and East Asian cuisine. The numbers are the relative contributions of each ingredient to the total cuisine, as defined in Ref. 1. These are ranked in order of greatest use from top to bottom.[1]

North American	Χ_i	East Asian	Χ_i
milk	0.529	rice	0.294
butter	0.511	red bean	0.152
cocoa	0.377	milk	0.055
vanilla	0.239	green tea	0.041
cream	0.154	butter	0.041
cream cheese	0.154	peanut	0.038
egg	0.151	mung bean	0.036
peanut butter	0.136	egg	0.033
strawberry	0.106	brown rice	0.031
cheddar cheese	0.098	nut	0.024
orange	0.095	mushroom	0.022
lemon	0.095	orange	0.016
coffee	0.085	soybean	0.015
cranberry	0.07	cinnamon	0.014
lime	0.065	enokiatke	0.013
tomato	-0.168	beef	-0.2498
white wine	-0.0556	ginger	-0.1032
beef	-0.0544	pork	-0.0987
onion	-0.0524	cayenne	-0.0686
chicken	-0.0498	chicken	-0.0662
tamarind	-0.0427	onion	-0.0541
vinegar	-0.0396	fish	-0.0458
pepper	-0.0356	bell pepper	-0.0414
pork	-0.0332	sesame seed	-0.041
celery	-0.0329	black pepper	-0.0409
bell pepper	-0.0306	shrimp	-0.0408
red wine	-0.0271	shiitake	-0.0329
black pepper	-0.0248	garlic	-0.0302
parsley	-0.0217	carrot	-0.0261
Parmesan cheese	-0.0197	tomato	-0.0246

Network-oriented papers always have some very pretty figures, such as the one shown below. See the caption of the original figure for an explanation.[1]

Figure caption

This figure shows the connections between food ingredients. No, you're not expected to read the tiny characters. Click on the image for a more readable version, and see the caption of the original figure for an explanation. (via arXiv Preprint Server, Fig. S4 of Ref. 1).

References: