Measured pairing · from 63,696 recipes

What goes with soy sauce?

Measured across 63,696 recipes, the 8 ingredients that co-occur with soy sauce most disproportionately are sake (×12.5 chance, n=569), sesame oil (×10.6 chance, n=1307), kelp (×9.5 chance, n=114), enokidake (×9.4 chance, n=67), thai pepper (×9.3 chance, n=85), shiitake (×7.3 chance, n=290), sesame seed (×7.2 chance, n=699) and chinese cabbage (×7.1 chance, n=82). 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. sake — PPMI 2.52 · ×12.5 chance · n=569 (sake itself appears in 681 recipes)
2. sesame oil — PPMI 2.36 · ×10.6 chance · n=1307 (sesame oil itself appears in 1,843 recipes)
3. kelp — PPMI 2.25 · ×9.5 chance · n=114 (kelp itself appears in 180 recipes)
4. enokidake — PPMI 2.25 · ×9.4 chance · n=67 (enokidake itself appears in 106 recipes)
5. thai pepper — PPMI 2.23 · ×9.3 chance · n=85 (thai pepper itself appears in 137 recipes)
6. shiitake — PPMI 1.98 · ×7.3 chance · n=290 (shiitake itself appears in 596 recipes)
7. sesame seed — PPMI 1.98 · ×7.2 chance · n=699 (sesame seed itself appears in 1,442 recipes)
8. chinese cabbage — PPMI 1.96 · ×7.1 chance · n=82 (chinese cabbage itself appears in 172 recipes)

Cook the pairing

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

• Bibimbap (비빔밥) — with sesame oil, shiitake, sesame seed
• Japchae (잡채) — with sesame oil, shiitake, sesame seed
• Vegetable Japchae — with sesame oil, shiitake, sesame seed
• Chikuzenni (Simmered Chicken and Root Vegetables) — with sake, sesame oil, shiitake
• Gungjung Tteokbokki (Royal Court Rice Cakes in Soy) — with sesame oil, shiitake, sesame seed
• Kenchinjiru (Temple Soup of Root Vegetables and Crumbled Tofu) — with sake, sesame oil, shiitake

How this was measured

soy sauce appears in 4,263 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.