Name: Peri-Peri Chicken
Ingredients: 2 small red bell peppers; 5 small bird's eye chillies (adjust to your taste); 5 medium-size garlic cloves; 1 medium-size onion; 2 tablespoons dried thyme; 2 tablespoons black pepper; 3 teaspoons salt or to taste; 3 tablespoons paprika; ½ cup vinegar; 1 medium-size lemon , juiced; ¾ cup olive oil; 2 chicken bouillon cubes , crushed; 2½ lbs chicken quarters

Why it works: Garlic and onion match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 29,058 recipes. Both carry furaneol, which smells caramel, strawberry. The science ↓

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.

Garlic + oniontop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together29,058 recipes

Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).
Thyme + lemontop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together3,973 recipes

Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).
Clove + thymetop 2% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together4,108 recipes

Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).
Garlic + olivetop 2% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together25,665 recipes

Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).
Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together27,047 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

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

What each ingredient does

Chicken quarters: Form the main body of the dish, cooking through while absorbing the marinade's flavour.
Olive oil: Carries the spices and aromatics, helping flavour coat the chicken and keeping the meat moist.
Paprika: Adds colour and mild sweet, smoky flavour, and helps the skin brown during baking.
Vinegar: Adds acidity that brightens the marinade and helps tenderise the surface of the chicken.
Bird's eye chillies: Provide the heat and sharp pepper flavour that define this peri-peri marinade.

The step that matters

Refrigerate the chicken in the marinade. Acid from the vinegar and lemon and salt from the marinade slowly penetrate the meat. Resting for at least an hour lets the flavour move inward instead of staying on the surface.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pepper, garlic, clove, thyme, vinegar, lemon, olive):

Shallotfits better
Kalefits better
Capsicumfits better
Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pepper, garlic, clove, thyme, vinegar, lemon, olive. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

Ingredient	Portion assumed	kcal
Chicken	100g cooked	165
Olive Oil	1 tbsp (14g)	119
Onion	1 medium (110g)	44
Red Bell Pepper	1 medium (119g)	31
Lemon	juice of 1 lemon (48ml)	12
Black Pepper	1 tsp ground (2.3g)	6
Garlic	1 clove (3g)	4
Thyme	1 tsp dried (1.4g)	4
Vinegar	1 tbsp (15ml) distilled	3
Salt	1 tsp (6g)	0

Peri-Peri Chicken