Name: Cauliflower and Tomato Sauce
Ingredients: 1 head cauliflower; tomato conserve

Why it works: Cauliflower and tomato work together. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 91 recipes. Both carry 1-octen-3-one, which smells mushroom, metallic. The science ↓

Cauliflower and Tomato Sauce

Ingredients

1 head cauliflower
tomato conserve

Directions

Boil the cauliflower until tender.
Place the cauliflower upright in a dish.
Warm the tomato conserve.
Carefully mask the cauliflower with the warm tomato conserve, starting from the edges.
Serve immediately.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

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.

Cauliflower + tomatotop 10% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together91 recipes

Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

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

What each ingredient does

Cauliflower: Forms the base of the dish; boiling softens it until tender.
Tomato conserve: Provides the coating sauce, adding moisture and fruity sweetness and acidity.

“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.