Why it works: Cauliflower and vinegar work together. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 888 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓
To Pickle Cauliflowers
Ingredients
Directions
Pull the cauliflowers into bunches and spread them on a dish.
Sprinkle coarse sea salt over them and let them stand for three days to draw out water.
Place them in jars and pour boiling saltwater over them, letting them stand overnight.
Drain them on a sieve and transfer to glass jars.
Fill the jars with distilled vinegar and seal tightly with leather.
Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.
Explore the science
The flavor team
The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.
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Cauliflower + vinegartop 13% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together888 recipes
Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).
Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs
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