Unexpected Flavour Pairings That Actually Work

Common sense would have you keeping these ingredients as far away from each other as possible. Flavour science, on the other hand, has some rather different ideas.

There are food pairings out there that seem to exist solely to test whether you’re willing to suspend your better judgement for the sake of curiosity. Looking at the components that make them up, you can’t quite shake the feeling that you’re having your leg pulled. But guess what, as questionable as they may appear to be on the surface, some of them do work, and work quite well indeed.

This is because flavour is composed of a lot more than we give it credit for. You’ll be aware of the basic tenets of sweetness, saltiness, bitterness, and all those other things you learned in school, but what you might not have known is that two seemingly opposing flavours can share aromatic compounds.

They can also influence one another’s perception, and occasionally expose combinations that sound downright preposterous until you actually put them in your mouth. Here are some examples that might weird you out at first, but have more than a decent chance of delighting you after.

Coca-Cola and Braised Pork

Using a can of Coke to braise pork sounds… unappetising, to say the least. You know those food channels that go out of their way to make excessive and ridiculous meals? It strikes me as the kind of thing you’d see on there. Having said that, it’s not quite as farcical as it may seem once you break it down. For a start, Coke is acidic, and that acidity helps to wear away some of the tougher connective tissue during a long braise.

It’s also infamously loaded with sugar which, when left bubbling away for long enough, concentrates into a sticky glaze that would otherwise require considerably more effort to produce on your own.

Then there’s the drink’s own blend of citrus oils and spices that help contribute to the flavour too. I’m with you in that it still feels wrong to pour a soft drink over several kilos of pork, but the results are out there, and apparently they’re hard to argue with.

White Chocolate and Caviar

At first glance, this seems the kind of thing a chef would throw together just to see how much his reputation for culinary genius will let him get away with. And that’s a plausibility that’s not entirely too far-fetched, as this combination was popularised by the one and only Heston Blumenthal, who became interested in pairing the two after research into flavour compounds suggested that white chocolate and caviar shared several aromatic amines.

I’ll spare you the science behind it, partially because I don’t fully understand it myself, but the important takeaway here is that our brains often respond positively when different foods carry overlapping aroma molecules, even if they appear to have absolutely nothing else in common.

The caviar’s salinity and umami serve to cut through the richness of the cocoa butter, while the white chocolate softens some of the caviar’s harsher marine notes. What you end up getting is not so much a fish-flavoured dessert, as abhorrent as that sounds, but more of an oddly harmonious symbiosis that sees both ingredients working to bring out the best in each other.

There’s no way you don’t have to be at least a little bit mad to discover something like this, because if you’d asked me to invent a dessert pairing from scratch, I’d have probably ranked “fish eggs” somewhere below “gravel”.

Strawberries, Balsamic Vinegar, and Black Pepper

I know what you’re thinking. Strawberries are expensive enough as it is, so why would you willingly drizzle vinegar over them when there are so many other perfectly respectable things you could be doing instead?

As with the previous examples, the logic here is sounder than it first appears. The acidity in the balsamic vinegar doesn’t compete with the strawberries as you might imagine it would. Instead, they come together to exaggerate what was already there, making the fruit taste even sweeter and more intensely strawberry-like.

Black pepper, meanwhile, contributes a gentle warmth and floral aromatics rather than outright heat, keeping the whole dessert from becoming one-dimensional. It’s something the Italians have been on to for years, and after trying it, you might start to question why everybody decided cream should be the default accompaniment instead.

It’s combinations like these that just go to show how unreliable our instincts can be. We like to think we know what goes together and what doesn’t, but exactly how much of that is down to mere conditioning? Every so often, you get a culinary maverick who decides, you know what? I am going to pour cola over this pork, and while I’m at it, I’ll spoon some caviar onto this white chocolate, and splash some vinegar over these strawberries simply because I know better than everybody else.

And then they get to be smug after when it all works out. It’s a useful reminder that, in cooking, as in most things, sounding ridiculous and being wrong aren’t necessarily always the same thing.

Opening image: Mart Production | Pexels