Attention food science nerds: new study explains why Asian food tastes so different from Western food

We don’t pretend to fully understand all the technical details, but the latest issue of Scientific Reports (a division of Nature) includes a somewhat mind-bending study that takes all the recipes from Epicurious, Allrecipes.com and Menupan (a Korean site), and throws them in a blender with a computational model of food chemistry (don’t ask) to arrive at (something like) the fundamental difference between North American cuisine and East Asian cuisine. Whereas North American cooking tends to pair ingredients that share a lot of flavour compounds (like butter and vanilla), Asian cooking tends to do the opposite, pairing ingredients that don’t taste a whole lot like one another (like soy sauce and scallion). Confused? The paper has all sorts of fancy visualizations to explain things. Read the entire story [Scientific Reports] »