Measured pairing · from 63,696 recipes

What goes with wheat?

Measured across 63,696 recipes, the 8 ingredients that co-occur with wheat most disproportionately are yeast (×3.0 chance, n=3331), lard (×2.7 chance, n=2778), oat (×2.4 chance, n=985), vanilla (×2.3 chance, n=6813), rhubarb (×2.2 chance, n=123), date (×2.1 chance, n=269), walnut (×2.1 chance, n=1978) and buttermilk (×2.1 chance, n=1170). 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. yeast — PPMI 1.08 · ×3.0 chance · n=3331 (yeast itself appears in 3,435 recipes)
2. lard — PPMI 1.00 · ×2.7 chance · n=2778 (lard itself appears in 3,103 recipes)
3. oat — PPMI 0.86 · ×2.4 chance · n=985 (oat itself appears in 1,268 recipes)
4. vanilla — PPMI 0.83 · ×2.3 chance · n=6813 (vanilla itself appears in 9,032 recipes)
5. rhubarb — PPMI 0.80 · ×2.2 chance · n=123 (rhubarb itself appears in 169 recipes)
6. date — PPMI 0.76 · ×2.1 chance · n=269 (date itself appears in 382 recipes)
7. walnut — PPMI 0.76 · ×2.1 chance · n=1978 (walnut itself appears in 2,816 recipes)
8. buttermilk — PPMI 0.75 · ×2.1 chance · n=1170 (buttermilk itself appears in 1,682 recipes)

Cook the pairing

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

• Pumpernickel — with yeast, vanilla
• Aish Baladi (Egyptian Flatbread) — with yeast
• Hefeweizen (Wheat Beer) — with yeast
• Nan-e Sangak (Stone-Baked Flatbread) — with yeast
• Swedish Crispbread (Knäckebröd) — with yeast
• Georgian Flatbread (Tonis Puri) — with yeast

How this was measured

wheat appears in 20,890 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.