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Spring Delight Salad

"This is a very elegant looking but extremely easy to make salad. Beautiful colors."

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Why it works: Spinach and alfalfa share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and 9 recipes mention both. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

The recipe

6 servings
Prep15 min
Cook10 min

Ingredients

Directions

Method written by CompKitchen from the ingredient list. Not the original author's method, not kitchen-tested.

  1. Heat the vegetable oil in a large skillet over medium heat for about 1 minute.

  2. Add the chopped red bell pepper and sliced mushrooms to the skillet and cook, stirring often, for 6 to 8 minutes until softened and lightly browned.

  3. Remove the skillet from the heat and let the pepper and mushrooms cool for a few minutes.

  4. Wash and dry the torn romaine lettuce and the chopped spinach, then place them in a large salad bowl.

  5. Add the chopped roma tomatoes and alfalfa sprouts to the bowl with the greens and toss to combine.

  6. Spoon the cooked pepper and mushrooms over the salad.

  7. Just before serving, pour the raspberry vinaigrette over the salad and toss until everything is evenly coated.

  8. Serve the salad right away.

By allrecipes. Recipe from Open Recipes.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much aroma chemistry they share, and how many recipes mention both.

  1. Spinach + alfalfatop 5% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together9 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Lettuce + spinachtop 2% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together427 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).

  3. Plum + raspberrytop 3% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together75 recipes

    Shared aroma: damascenone (apple, rose).

  4. Lettuce + alfalfatop 3% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together18 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Tomato + mushroomtop 4% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together2,718 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans,trans-2,4-nonadienal (fatty, green).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

Flavor stand-ins for the raspberry

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pepper, lettuce, spinach, plum, tomato, mushroom, alfalfa):

  1. Avocadobetter flavor fit
  2. Cherrybetter flavor fit
  3. Limebetter flavor fit
  4. Raspberrythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pepper, lettuce, spinach, plum, tomato, mushroom, alfalfa. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes. This compares flavor only: it does not check the job the ingredient does in the dish (bulk, moisture, acidity, structure).