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Kale and Quinoa Salad with Ricotta Salata

It’s not my best quality, but I have a hard time talking about kale or quinoa with a straight face. When an ingredient is , when it is treated as if it were the answer to all food questions — what might feed us dinner/a be tricked into eating in muffins/be juiced for longevity/and possibly even save — I can’t help but want to rebel against it and both of these ingredients, these darlings of the farm-to-table circuit with their ubiquity on nearly every restaurant menu in lower Manhattan and upper Brooklyn, make easy targets. I know, I know, I should grow up and stuff.

By smittenkitchen · From Open Recipes · 14 ingredients
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Why it works: Quinoa and kale share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and 41 recipes mention both. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

The recipe

Ingredients

Contains: milk, tree nuts (auto-detected from the ingredients and method; we can miss things, so check labels)

Directions

Step-by-step directions aren't available for this recipe. See the full recipe at the source →

By smittenkitchen. 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. Quinoa + kaletop 2% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together41 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Dill + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together976 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  3. Kale + lemontop 4% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapmoderate
    Mentioned together226 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Almond + olivetop 4% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together1,586 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  5. Lemon + white winetop 4% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapmoderate
    Mentioned together3,764 recipes

    Shared aroma: myrcene (balsamic, herbaceous).

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

Flavor stand-ins for the almond

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (quinoa, kale, dill, lemon, olive, white wine, vinegar):

  1. Chickpeabetter flavor fit
  2. Beansbetter flavor fit
  3. Lentilsbetter flavor fit
  4. Almondthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against quinoa, kale, dill, lemon, olive, white wine, vinegar. 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).