If you've ever wondered why orange-flavored coffee exists or why chefs combine strange pairs like chocolate and blue cheese, this fun flavor map is for you. With it you can see how many foods and drinks have shared flavor compounds.
Scientific American explains:
Science-minded chefs have gone so far as to suggest that seemingly incongruous ingredients—chocolate and blue cheese, for example—will taste great together as long as they have enough flavor compounds in common. Scientists recently put this hypothesis to the test by creating a flavor map, a variant of which we have reproduced here. Lines connect foods that have components in common; thick lines mean many components are shared. By comparing the flavor network with various recipe databases, the researchers conclude that chefs do tend to pair ingredients with shared flavor compounds—but only in Western cuisine. Dishes from a database of recipes from East Asia tend to combine ingredients with few overlapping flavors.
To read the chart, click on the food dot. The bigger the dot, the more popular the food is (according to a global database of 56,498 recipes). Lines that connect two dots show they have at least one flavor compound in common; the thicker the line, the more flavor compounds they share. Red lines connect foods in different categories.
It's similar to previously mentioned Foodpairing