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Bulgur Salad with Chickpeas and Red Peppers

One thing I have heard a lot of since I launched this site but six months ago is “I just don’t know how you find all that time to cook.” And while my typical response is that “Oh, well I don’t have a life so that makes it really easy,” and I’m only a little bit joking — my office is 13 blocks from my apartment, I rarely work past 6:30 p.m., I tend to wake up hours before my husband on the weekends, eager to fiddle with recipes that would otherwise be too time-consuming, and I don’t have the energy or the liver to go out many nights a week anymore — the truth is that aside from making some fresh pasta with about two pounds of wild mushrooms two Sundays ago, I haven’t cooked dinner for us in . And I hate it.

By smittenkitchen · From Open Recipes · 15 ingredients
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Why it works: Chickpea and pita bread work together. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and 21 recipes mention both. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

The recipe

Ingredients

Contains: wheat (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. Chickpea + pita breadtop 5% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapmoderate
    Mentioned together21 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Cumin + chickpeatop 1% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together473 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

  3. Lemon + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together27,039 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  4. Bulgur + chickpeatop 2% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together19 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Bulgur + cumintop 3% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapmoderate
    Mentioned together49 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

Flavor stand-ins for the cherry tomato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (bulgur, lemon, honey, cumin, pepper, olive, chickpea):

  1. Limebetter flavor fit
  2. Cherrybetter flavor fit
  3. Avocadobetter flavor fit
  4. Cherry tomatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against bulgur, lemon, honey, cumin, pepper, olive, chickpea. 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).