Name: Promotion Bread
Ingredients: barley; raw peanuts; rice flour; 1 egg white; lemon juice; orange juice; pineapple juice; tart fruits

Why it works: Lemon and orange match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,634 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Promotion Bread

Ingredients

Directions

Soak barley in enough water to cover for 12 to 36 hours until the glume begins to rise.
Pour off any excess water and set the dish in strong sunlight with a breeze.
Spread the barley on paper to dry quickly.
Grind the dried barley and mix it with an equal quantity of raw peanuts.
Add enough rice flour to form the mixture into small balls.
Dip the balls into a beaten egg white mixed with lemon, orange, or pineapple juice.
Smooth the balls with additional rice flour and serve with tart fruits.

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.

Lemon + orangetop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together10,634 recipes

Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).
Barley + ricetop 3% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together568 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).
Peanut + ricetop 4% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together670 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline (popcorn, roasted).
Orange + pineappletop 6% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together1,664 recipes

Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).
Barley + peanuttop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together19 recipes

Shared aroma: acetylpyrazine (roast).

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

Swap the pineapple

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (barley, peanut, rice, flour, egg, lemon, orange):

Limefits better
Coconutfits better
Avocadofits better
Pineapplethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against barley, peanut, rice, flour, egg, lemon, orange. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.