What makes the tomato and cheese combination such a hit?

Sony AI and researchers at Korea University put their heads together to develop an AI tool called FlavorGraph that could come up with innovative ingredient pairings to help chefs develop new, delicious dishes. (ZDNet)

Will two ingredients make a hit in a new recipe? FlavorGraph will predict the chances of that by combining its knowledge of the flavor molecules in those ingredients with the traditional recipes that used those ingredients in the past. AI-empowered FlavorGraph is a master of ingredient pairings science and can tell you if your brainwave is fit to make it to the dinner table.

How it works

Clearly, AI is making inroads into the culinary world. Earlier this month, we wrote about how Google Cloud and Mars Wrigley UK explored the digitization of taste by using AI to develop the first-ever Maltesers AI cake.

In February, British engineering AI software company Monolith applied AI to create the ultimate pancake recipe. It used seven ingredients and needed just one toss to create a drool-worthy stack of American-style fluffy pancakes.

FlavorGraph works on the thesis that certain classic food combinations such as tomato and cheese or apple and pork are highly successful because their ingredients contained dominant flavor molecules that clicked together.

The researchers trained their program with data on 1,561 flavor molecules and over a million recipes. The program, therefore, learned which molecules went well together and could devise new, hitherto unthought-of recipes using innovative molecular combinations within the profiles of bitter, fruity, green, sweet, and woody, for example.

The outlook for AI in flavor pairings

“As well as relationships between food ingredients and flavor compounds that have not been explored before, the FlavorGraph research will allow greater flexibility for matching single or multiple ingredients to many others,” the researchers said in a blog announcing FlavorGraph.

“As the science develops and we get ever better representations of food, we should discover more and more intriguing pairings of ingredients, as well as new substitutes for ingredients that are either unhealthy or unsustainable.”

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