Measured pairing · from 63,696 recipes

What goes with yeast?

Measured across 63,696 recipes, the 8 ingredients that co-occur with yeast most disproportionately are rye flour (×10.3 chance, n=73), grain wheat flour (×5.3 chance, n=209), caraway (×3.8 chance, n=48), wheat (×3.0 chance, n=3331), milk (×2.9 chance, n=2137), cured pork (×2.1 chance, n=36), buttermilk (×2.0 chance, n=185) and mozzarella cheese (×2.0 chance, n=162). 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. rye flour — PPMI 2.33 · ×10.3 chance · n=73 (rye flour itself appears in 131 recipes)
2. grain wheat flour — PPMI 1.67 · ×5.3 chance · n=209 (grain wheat flour itself appears in 733 recipes)
3. caraway — PPMI 1.33 · ×3.8 chance · n=48 (caraway itself appears in 235 recipes)
4. wheat — PPMI 1.08 · ×3.0 chance · n=3331 (wheat itself appears in 20,890 recipes)
5. milk — PPMI 1.07 · ×2.9 chance · n=2137 (milk itself appears in 13,577 recipes)
6. cured pork — PPMI 0.75 · ×2.1 chance · n=36 (cured pork itself appears in 315 recipes)
7. buttermilk — PPMI 0.71 · ×2.0 chance · n=185 (buttermilk itself appears in 1,682 recipes)
8. mozzarella cheese — PPMI 0.70 · ×2.0 chance · n=162 (mozzarella cheese itself appears in 1,484 recipes)

Cook the pairing

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

• Swedish Crispbread (Knäckebröd) — with caraway, wheat
• Croissant — with milk
• Naan — with milk
• Pan Dulce (Conchas) — with milk
• Pan de Yema — with milk
• Tsoureki (Sweet Easter Bread) — with milk

How this was measured

yeast appears in 3,435 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.