Measured pairing · from 63,696 recipes

What goes with grain wheat flour?

Measured across 63,696 recipes, the 8 ingredients that co-occur with grain wheat flour most disproportionately are rye flour (×17.9 chance, n=27), oat (×9.2 chance, n=134), honey (×5.9 chance, n=185), yeast (×5.3 chance, n=209), buttermilk (×4.3 chance, n=84), maple syrup (×3.6 chance, n=21), banana (×3.1 chance, n=37) and raisin (×3.1 chance, n=69). 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. rye flour — PPMI 2.88 · ×17.9 chance · n=27 (rye flour itself appears in 131 recipes)
  2. oat — PPMI 2.22 · ×9.2 chance · n=134 (oat itself appears in 1,268 recipes)
  3. honey — PPMI 1.78 · ×5.9 chance · n=185 (honey itself appears in 2,717 recipes)
  4. yeast — PPMI 1.67 · ×5.3 chance · n=209 (yeast itself appears in 3,435 recipes)
  5. buttermilk — PPMI 1.47 · ×4.3 chance · n=84 (buttermilk itself appears in 1,682 recipes)
  6. maple syrup — PPMI 1.28 · ×3.6 chance · n=21 (maple syrup itself appears in 507 recipes)
  7. banana — PPMI 1.14 · ×3.1 chance · n=37 (banana itself appears in 1,032 recipes)
  8. raisin — PPMI 1.12 · ×3.1 chance · n=69 (raisin itself appears in 1,963 recipes)

How this was measured

grain wheat flour appears in 733 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.

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