Why it works: Orange and coconut work together. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 584 recipes. Both carry ethyl octanoate, which smells fruity, wine. The science ↓
Orange Salad
Ingredients
Directions
Peel the oranges and cut them into thin slices.
Layer the orange slices in a glass dish, sprinkling sugar between each layer.
Squeeze the juice of three oranges over the layered oranges.
Pour a cup of good wine over the entire dish, adding more sugar if desired.
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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Orange + coconuttop 11% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together584 recipes
Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).
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Orange + winetop 14% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together2,046 recipes
Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).
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Orange + sugartop 20% of all pairsSmell alikelowCooked together19,212 recipes
Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).
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Sugar + coconuttop 22% of all pairsSmell alikelowCooked together5,742 recipes
Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).
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Wine + coconuttop 27% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together159 recipes
Shared aroma: gamma-nonanolactone (coconut, sweet).
Orange and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 19,212 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.
Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs
What each ingredient does
- Oranges
- Provide the main fruit body, fresh flavour and juice that softens into the syrup.
- Sugar
- Sweetens the salad and draws juice out of the oranges, forming a syrup.
- Wine
- Adds aroma and acidity, and its liquid helps flavour and moisten the fruit.
Swap the coconut
The recipe marks coconut as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (orange, sugar, wine):
- Lemonfits better
- Vanillafits better
- Grapefits better
- Coconutthe original
Fit is the average pairing score against orange, sugar, wine. 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.
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