Measured pairing · from 63,696 recipes

What goes with rice?

Measured across 63,696 recipes, the 8 ingredients that co-occur with rice most disproportionately are seaweed (×8.9 chance, n=116), wasabi (×7.9 chance, n=65), soybean (×6.8 chance, n=490), barley (×6.5 chance, n=110), squid (×6.0 chance, n=87), enokidake (×5.9 chance, n=38), sesame oil (×5.8 chance, n=655) and thai pepper (×5.4 chance, n=45). 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. seaweed — PPMI 2.18 · ×8.9 chance · n=116 (seaweed itself appears in 215 recipes)
2. wasabi — PPMI 2.07 · ×7.9 chance · n=65 (wasabi itself appears in 135 recipes)
3. soybean — PPMI 1.91 · ×6.8 chance · n=490 (soybean itself appears in 1,192 recipes)
4. barley — PPMI 1.88 · ×6.5 chance · n=110 (barley itself appears in 276 recipes)
5. squid — PPMI 1.79 · ×6.0 chance · n=87 (squid itself appears in 238 recipes)
6. enokidake — PPMI 1.77 · ×5.9 chance · n=38 (enokidake itself appears in 106 recipes)
7. sesame oil — PPMI 1.76 · ×5.8 chance · n=655 (sesame oil itself appears in 1,843 recipes)
8. thai pepper — PPMI 1.69 · ×5.4 chance · n=45 (thai pepper itself appears in 137 recipes)

Cook the pairing

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

• Ahi Tuna Poke Bowl — with soybean, sesame oil
• Weeknight Beef Bulgogi Rice Bowls — with soybean, sesame oil
• Beef Teriyaki Stir-Fry with Vegetables — with soybean, sesame oil
• Chicken Bulgogi Bowl — with soybean, sesame oil
• Chicken Teriyaki Meal Prep Bowls — with soybean, sesame oil
• Chili Garlic Shrimp Stir-Fry — with soybean, sesame oil

How this was measured

rice appears in 3,878 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.