Pairing Flavours

Much of the effort around eating or drinking has to do with finding flavours that ‘go together’.

When I say go together, I am not referring to the act of, say, adding Marmite or Bovril to a slice of cheap white bread.

To start with: Cheap white bread has no flavour and serves merely as a convenient vehicle for delivering other flavours such as Marmite, Bovril or your favourite apricot or strawberry jam. Cheap white bread adds no flavour, clashes with no other flavour (it is devoid of all flavour), enhances no other flavour, and as a result, would not be missed when it is omitted from the dish.

I am of the opinion cheap white bread was created because it is deemed socially obnoxious and distasteful to eat Marmite with a teaspoon. So we spread it on cheap white bread.

The food world has many ‘classic’ combinations or ‘tried-and-trusted’ combinations such as tomato and basil, for example. Or peanut butter and honey. Or strawberries and black pepper.

The latter combination of ingredients may sound strange to you, and you would be forgiven to think that oily fish cannot be paired with cherries, or that coffee and apple should be kept apart as far as the Sahara is from the Namib. But the truth is, there is scientific evidence to suggest that the ingredients in these strange pairings have something in common, and thus, that they should be paired together, no matter how strange it appears to us.

With our taste buds, we can distinguish between salt, sweet, sour, umami and bitter tastes. But our sense of smell is much, much greater and our nose is capable of distinguishing between thousands of odours. Thus, it is here that the greatest potential for flavour pairings is located. If you do not believe the power of smell over flavour, try eating something tasty with a blocked nose; it is like eating cardboard box, or cheap white bread.

At least one significant international project on flavour pairings is focused on the science of flavour and flavour pairings.

Flavourpairing.com states that “aromas are the key drivers of our flavour experience and therefore crucial for the synergy of food and drinks. As much as 80% of what we call taste is actually aroma”.

Their process starts by determining the aroma profile of a specific ingredient through a process called gas chromatography mass spectrometry (GC-MS). Food pairing scientists then extract the aromas relevant to human smell. A strawberry, for example, contains many aromas but only a few stand out to determine the strawberry smell we are familiar with. But “[t]hrough enhancing interactions, some aromas that are below this threshold do generate a detectable smell”. In the case of the humble strawberry, it is mainly the fruity, cheesy, green and roasted aromas that determine its distinctive smell.

Just like that… boom! I’ve lost you.

What the hell?

Strawberries smell cheesy?

Has the world gone mad?

I suppose I could just as well tell you that some red wines smell like fresh containers filled with brand new tennis balls. Well, I kid you not… I saw a wine documentary just the other night where a master sommelier used that very aromatic image to describe a specific red wine from the Bordeaux region.

Of course this does not mean that there are compounds of ‘new tennis balls’ present in the wine, it is just detectable suggestions of flavour stemming from the reinforced aromas of the wine. And with a certain degree of practice, we can all pick up on these reinforced aromas.

The second step in food pairing’s methodology consists of analysing the data collected during step one and using algorythms to calculate how well food and drinks match.

Taste is cultural, or so it seems.

In Western cuisine pairings are made with ingredients that contain the same flavour compounds – elements in Ingredient A are echoed in ingredient B. But in Asian cuisine, quite the opposite is preferred, and pairing is done with ingredients that seemingly have nothing in common.

Food and wine have been paired for millennia to ensure a better dining or better drinking experience. Even non-wine drinkers, when asked about what wine to serve with what food, will recollect someone telling them that red wine “goes with” red meat, and white wine with fish and chicken. Fortunately, when it comes to wine (and food, of course), we do not have to remain stuck within such unyielding guidelines and parameters. But we need to be careful not to abolish all sense of direction by thinking we could pair food and wine in a random, willy-nilly fashion.

Wines have a few keys that help us understand what kind of wines we are dealing with, and how such wines could be employed in conjunction with food.

These include: Acidity, sweetness, saltiness, tannin (bitterness), oak (woodiness) and alcohol content.

Food on the other hand is shaped by: Ingredients, cooking methods, sauces and condiments and add-ons to dishes.

Of course wines are also used in the actual preparation and cooking of food – for example as an ingredient in marinades or liquid ingredient to roasting, braising or stewing.

Each palette is unique and each mouth tastes something different. So when it comes to matching food and wine, we need to understand that not all guests or patrons will taste the intended connections between your food and wine pairings.

Once you have decided upon the star (the food or the wine but not both equally), the following tentative guidelines may help.

If your wine is tart, look for food that is fatty, or tart.

If you are serving sweet dessert wine, choose a dessert that is less sweet than the wine or a cheese course that is slightly salty.

It is very difficult to pair wine with seriously hot, spicy food, especially wine that is high in alcohol because wine often makes the food seem hotter. Stick to beer in such a case.