About & FAQ
What is Palate?
Palate helps you understand your own taste, and then cook to it. Take a short taste test and it maps your palate across eighteen flavor notes. Paste any recipe and it shows you the dish's flavor shape — a six-axis hexagon of what it will actually taste like. And each week it hands you a few recipes matched to your palate, with one chosen to stretch it.
This page answers the questions people ask most. It's written plainly on purpose — the same way we write everything here.
What is Palate?
Palate is a gastronomy engine that maps your personal taste and recommends recipes that fit it. You take a short taste test to build a palate profile, you can paste any recipe to see its flavor 'X-ray', and each week Palate hands you a small set of recipes matched to your palate — plus one chosen to gently stretch it.
How does the taste test work?
The taste test is a short series of honest, food-grounded questions — the last bite you'd fight over, the jar in your fridge door, how you feel about fish sauce. Your answers are turned into a flavor-preference profile across eighteen taste notes and a few dispositions (how much novelty, intensity, and effort you enjoy). It takes a few minutes and needs no cooking.
What is a flavor X-ray and the hexagon?
When you paste a recipe, 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, grouped for readability into a six-axis hexagon (Umami & Savory, Sweet & Fruity, Sour & Bright, Bitter & Earthy, Rich & Fat, Aromatic & Spice). The hexagon is the recipe's 'shape' — a picture of what it will actually taste like.
What are the Weekly Five?
Once a week Palate drops 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.
What are taste types?
After the taste test, your palate is classified into 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). Each type is a doorway to the dishes and flavor notes it tends to love. The classification is deterministic: the same palate always maps to the same type.
How does Palate decide which recipes to recommend?
Two layers, kept deliberately separate. First, every recipe is embedded into an objective flavor profile by the engine — the engine measures the food, it never guesses what you'll like. Second, a recommender compares your palate profile to those recipe profiles to find genuine matches. Keeping the flavor measurement independent of the recommendation is what lets Palate be honest about what a dish tastes like.
How many recipes does Palate know?
The current beta runs on a curated corpus of 1,411 recipes spanning dozens of world cuisines, each one X-rayed by the engine into its flavor profile. You can also paste your own recipe at any time to see its flavor profile immediately.
Is Palate free?
Yes. Palate is free during the public beta and never asks for a card. You sign in so your taste map, cook log, and Weekly Five follow you across devices.
Do I need an account, and what about my data?
You need a free account to save your palate, cook log, and Weekly Five. Palate does not sell your data, run ads, or share it beyond the handful of services that run the app, and you can have everything deleted at any time. When you paste a recipe to X-ray it, only the recipe text is analyzed — never your identity.
Who makes Palate?
Palate is an independent project, currently in an early public beta. It is built by one person and focused on doing one thing well: helping you understand your own taste and cook food you'll love.
Meet your palate.
A short taste test — a few honest questions about what you reach for — and you'll meet your taste type, and the dishes that fit it.
Take the taste test →