A food and beverage map: Exploring food-beverage pairing through projective mapping

Sammendrag

Food pairing has been a popular topic amongst scientists, chefs, and researchers who try to find new successful food combinations and identify a pattern in how consumers pair food (Ahn et al., 2011). When studying food pairing, the “food pairing hypothesis” arises, which states that two ingredients that share chemical compounds are more likely to taste (and smell) good together (Simas et al., 2017, Kort et al., 2010, Tallab and Alrazgan, 2016). From a gastronomic approach, flavor pairing could be defined as flavors that, if paired, will produce an experience that is more appreciated than either of the two flavors alone (Møller, 2013). However, not all the flavor combinations are accepted worldwide, as they also heavily rely on culture (Arellano-Covarrubias et al., 2019). Ahnert, 2013, Simas et al., 2017 studied the influence of culture and found that the rules that followed the food pairing are different between cultures. For example, Ahn et al. (2011) found that, in general, both Western and European Cuisine use ingredients that share similar flavor compounds, while East Asian Cuisine does the opposite. Following this last statement, Jain et al. (2015) found that different regional Indian Cuisines followed “negative” food pairing patterns: meaning that the higher the flavor sharing between two ingredients of Indian recipes, the lower the co-occurrence in that cuisine. Besides the influence of culture in food pairing, other authors like Shepherd (2006) stated that the perception of flavor involves many sensory and motor systems. For instance, integral components of our eating experiences arise from all sub modalities of the somatosensory system: fine touch, creaminess, deep pressure (such as crunchiness), temperature, and pain (in the case of the burning sensation of chilis). In other words, an additional layer of olfactive or aromatic coincidence should be added to the act of pairing two or more food products. In this way, Eschevins et al. (2019) reported some pairing principles obtained from French sommeliers and beer experts that could be categorized in “conceptual” (geographical identity and context of consumption), “affective” (consumers’ preferences and emotions), and “perceptual” (aroma, taste, texture); so, when venturing into food pairing research, several aspects should be considered. Traditionally, food pairing research has widely focused on studies with wine and foods, such as cheese (Galmarini, 2020, Harrington and Seo, 2015, King and Cliff, 2005;). Some research studied how certain attributes of wine were affected by different food pairings. To take an example, hollandaise sauce (Nygren et al., 2001) and blue mold cheese (Nygren et al. 2002) were found to affect the perception of wine attributes such as a decrease in sour, bitter and toasted flavors, and an increase in butter flavor, in the case of hollandaise sauce research (Nygren et al., 2001); while buttery and woolly flavors and saltiness and sour taste decreased after tasting dry white wine (Nygren et al., 2002). With similar results, Madrigal-Galán and Heymann (2006) evaluated the effect of cheese before wine consumption and found that some wine attributes such as astringency, bell pepper, and oak flavor significantly decreased when red wine was evaluated after tasting the cheese. Therefore, the consumption of certain foods has been shown to impact the perception of the beverage, and vice versa; consuming a certain beverage is able to modify the perception of certain foods. In a recent study, Kustos et al. (2020) found that appropriate food and wine pairings are positively correlated to liking, sensory complexity, and expected price to pay, and negatively with balance as a slight wine dominance was preferred. Bastian et al. (2010) evaluated wine and cheese matches where consumers rated whether the wine dominated the pair, or the cheese, or if the combination was an “ideal match”.