Measured pairing · from 63,696 recipes

What goes with sesame seed?

Measured across 63,696 recipes, the 8 ingredients that co-occur with sesame seed most disproportionately are sesame oil (×15.6 chance, n=652), chinese cabbage (×13.6 chance, n=53), seaweed (×13.6 chance, n=66), wasabi (×10.8 chance, n=33), soybean (×9.3 chance, n=252), enokidake (×9.2 chance, n=22), squid (×8.7 chance, n=47) and sake (×8.2 chance, n=126). 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. sesame oil — PPMI 2.75 · ×15.6 chance · n=652 (sesame oil itself appears in 1,843 recipes)
2. chinese cabbage — PPMI 2.61 · ×13.6 chance · n=53 (chinese cabbage itself appears in 172 recipes)
3. seaweed — PPMI 2.61 · ×13.6 chance · n=66 (seaweed itself appears in 215 recipes)
4. wasabi — PPMI 2.38 · ×10.8 chance · n=33 (wasabi itself appears in 135 recipes)
5. soybean — PPMI 2.23 · ×9.3 chance · n=252 (soybean itself appears in 1,192 recipes)
6. enokidake — PPMI 2.22 · ×9.2 chance · n=22 (enokidake itself appears in 106 recipes)
7. squid — PPMI 2.17 · ×8.7 chance · n=47 (squid itself appears in 238 recipes)
8. sake — PPMI 2.10 · ×8.2 chance · n=126 (sake itself appears in 681 recipes)

Cook the pairing

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

• Ssamjang (쌈장) — with sesame oil, soybean
• Korean Steamed Clams Appetizer — with sesame oil, soybean
• Ahi Tuna Poke Bowl — with sesame oil, soybean
• Weeknight Beef Bulgogi Rice Bowls — with sesame oil, soybean
• Beef Teriyaki Stir-Fry with Vegetables — with sesame oil, soybean
• Chicken Bulgogi Bowl — with sesame oil, soybean

How this was measured

sesame seed appears in 1,442 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.