What is this, exactly?

The taste test is a short series of honest, food-grounded questions — the last bite you'd fight someone for, the jar that lives in your fridge door, how you really feel about fish sauce. There's no cooking and no trivia; you're just telling the truth about what you reach for.

From your answers, Palate builds a palate profile across eighteen flavor notes and a few dispositions — how much novelty, intensity, and effort you enjoy. It then places you in one of twelve taste types: warm, character-driven archetypes like The Ember Chaser (heat and smoke), The Umami Diver (deep savory depth), or The Acid Trip (bright, sour, alive). The type is a doorway, not a box — and the classification is deterministic, so the same palate always lands in the same place.

Paste any recipe and Palate breaks it into its ingredients and cooking steps and computes an objective flavor profile — eighteen notes such as umami, bright acid, heat, and richness. For readability those notes are grouped into a six-axis hexagon: Umami & Savory, Sweet & Fruity, Sour & Bright, Bitter & Earthy, Rich & Fat, and Aromatic & Spice.

The hexagon is the dish's shape — a picture of what it will actually taste like before you cook it. The Flavor Atlas is the field guide to those notes: all eighteen, what each one tastes like in ingredients you already know, and the corpus dishes where each sings loudest.

Once a week, Palate hands you five recipes chosen to match your palate — with one stretch pick that reaches just past your comfort zone. It's a small, considered selection rather than an endless feed. The idea is to cook something you'll be glad you made, not to scroll.

The five are a settled weekly drop — they hold steady across your devices so you can plan around them — which is a different thing from the fresh suggestions you can pull up any time you want a new idea.

The Studio is for the times you want to make something rather than pick something. You start from an ingredient or a direction, and Palate suggests what pairs well with it — grounded in real flavor affinities, not just what commonly appears together. Add something off-script and it re-reads the whole dish and reaches for the next thing that would genuinely complete it.

It's a quieter, more exploratory corner than the weekly picks — a place to follow a curiosity and see where the flavors lead.

You don't need an account to look around. Explore lets you search and browse the whole recipe corpus and see each dish's flavor profile. Cuisines reads the engine's profiles back the other way — the flavor character of each world cuisine, from Italian to Thai to Mexican, with a few dishes to start from.

And the Atlas steps all the way back: the whole corpus mapped as a sky of flavor, so you can see how cuisines and dishes relate to one another across the six families.