Measured pairing · from 63,696 recipes

What goes with avocado?

Measured across 63,696 recipes, the 8 ingredients that co-occur with avocado most disproportionately are lime juice (×10.0 chance, n=212), seaweed (×8.6 chance, n=22), black bean (×8.1 chance, n=59), cilantro (×8.1 chance, n=273), lettuce (×8.0 chance, n=121), lime (×6.9 chance, n=106), mango (×6.3 chance, n=34) and crab (×3.8 chance, n=26). The score behind the ranking is positive pointwise mutual information — how many times more often a pair shares a recipe than random combination would predict — and n is the number of recipes containing both ingredients. Nothing is published below a floor of 20 recipes per pair and 100 per ingredient. Co-occurrence records what recipe authors actually do — it conflates deliciousness with popularity and tradition — so read it as ethnography, not judgment.

The measured partners — PPMI · ×chance · n

1. lime juice — PPMI 2.30 · ×10.0 chance · n=212 (lime juice itself appears in 1,796 recipes)
2. seaweed — PPMI 2.16 · ×8.6 chance · n=22 (seaweed itself appears in 215 recipes)
3. black bean — PPMI 2.10 · ×8.1 chance · n=59 (black bean itself appears in 611 recipes)
4. cilantro — PPMI 2.09 · ×8.1 chance · n=273 (cilantro itself appears in 2,851 recipes)
5. lettuce — PPMI 2.08 · ×8.0 chance · n=121 (lettuce itself appears in 1,280 recipes)
6. lime — PPMI 1.94 · ×6.9 chance · n=106 (lime itself appears in 1,288 recipes)
7. mango — PPMI 1.84 · ×6.3 chance · n=34 (mango itself appears in 457 recipes)
8. crab — PPMI 1.33 · ×3.8 chance · n=26 (crab itself appears in 579 recipes)

Cook the pairing

Dishes in Palate's live corpus that use avocado with one of its measured partners:

• Carne Asada Burrito Bowl with Grilled Corn — with lime juice, black bean, cilantro, lettuce, lime
• The Kitchen Tourists' Best Tex-Mex Burger! — with lime juice, cilantro, lettuce, lime
• Loaded Beef Burrito Bowl with Cilantro Lime Rice — with lime juice, black bean, cilantro, lime
• Skillet Black Bean and Sweet Potato Tacos — with lime juice, black bean, cilantro, lime
• Guacamole — with lime juice, cilantro, lime
• Ensalada de Aguacate (Avocado Salad) — with lime juice, cilantro, lime

How this was measured

avocado appears in 755 of the 63,696 recipes counted (5,296 parsed + 1,081 hand-curated + 57,319 from the dataset published with Ahn et al., 2011). PPMI = max(0, ln(count(A,B)·N / (count(A)·count(B)))), all counts over the same N; lift = e^PMI, which reads directly as "×chance." Staples (salt, sugar, flour, water) are excluded because sources under-record them, and pairs where one name contains the other are excluded as near-duplicates.

Read the numbers with their limits: the corpus is Western-skewed (90% of it is the largely North American and European recipe dataset published with Ahn et al.'s 2011 paper), so the absence of a pairing here proves nothing except who wrote the recipes down. PPMI favors the rare end even above the floor — a niche pair at n=22 can outrank a workhorse pair seen thousands of times, because common ingredients' huge counts divide the score down — so read PPMI and n together.

The full reference — 150 ingredients, top 8 partners each — lives at What actually goes with X.

Curious how these flavors fit your palate — take the short taste test →

Every number above is counted from recipes — pointwise mutual information over 63,696 of them — not chef interviews, model guesses, or reviews.