Measured pairing · from 63,696 recipes
What goes with mozzarella cheese?
Measured across 63,696 recipes, the 8 ingredients that co-occur with mozzarella cheese most disproportionately are cured pork (×11.7 chance, n=86), provolone cheese (×9.4 chance, n=41), cottage cheese (×8.3 chance, n=73), basil (×7.0 chance, n=676), parmesan cheese (×6.5 chance, n=551), pork sausage (×5.5 chance, n=175), macaroni (×5.3 chance, n=395) and oregano (×5.2 chance, n=418). 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
- cured pork — PPMI 2.46 · ×11.7 chance · n=86 (cured pork itself appears in 315 recipes)
- provolone cheese — PPMI 2.24 · ×9.4 chance · n=41 (provolone cheese itself appears in 187 recipes)
- cottage cheese — PPMI 2.12 · ×8.3 chance · n=73 (cottage cheese itself appears in 377 recipes)
- basil — PPMI 1.94 · ×7.0 chance · n=676 (basil itself appears in 4,153 recipes)
- parmesan cheese — PPMI 1.88 · ×6.5 chance · n=551 (parmesan cheese itself appears in 3,628 recipes)
- pork sausage — PPMI 1.70 · ×5.5 chance · n=175 (pork sausage itself appears in 1,371 recipes)
- macaroni — PPMI 1.67 · ×5.3 chance · n=395 (macaroni itself appears in 3,181 recipes)
- oregano — PPMI 1.66 · ×5.2 chance · n=418 (oregano itself appears in 3,429 recipes)
Cook the pairing
Dishes in Palate's live corpus that use mozzarella cheese with one of its measured partners:
- Baked Ziti with Italian Sausage — with basil, parmesan cheese, oregano
- Chicken and Sausage Rigatoni Bake — with basil, parmesan cheese, oregano
- Chicken Parmesan with Melted Mozzarella — with basil, parmesan cheese, oregano
- Eggplant Parmesan — with basil, parmesan cheese, oregano
- Skillet Chicken Parmesan — with basil, parmesan cheese, oregano
- Spinach and Four-Cheese Stuffed Shells — with provolone cheese, basil, parmesan cheese
How this was measured
mozzarella cheese appears in 1,484 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.