Measured pairing · from 63,696 recipes

What goes with yogurt?

Measured across 63,696 recipes, the 8 ingredients that co-occur with yogurt most disproportionately are grape (×6.0 chance, n=38), mint (×5.4 chance, n=113), cardamom (×5.2 chance, n=38), fenugreek (×5.0 chance, n=84), lamb (×4.9 chance, n=49), turmeric (×4.9 chance, n=128), strawberry (×4.7 chance, n=94) and banana (×4.6 chance, n=85). 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. grape — PPMI 1.79 · ×6.0 chance · n=38 (grape itself appears in 353 recipes)
2. mint — PPMI 1.69 · ×5.4 chance · n=113 (mint itself appears in 1,154 recipes)
3. cardamom — PPMI 1.66 · ×5.2 chance · n=38 (cardamom itself appears in 403 recipes)
4. fenugreek — PPMI 1.60 · ×5.0 chance · n=84 (fenugreek itself appears in 942 recipes)
5. lamb — PPMI 1.60 · ×4.9 chance · n=49 (lamb itself appears in 551 recipes)
6. turmeric — PPMI 1.59 · ×4.9 chance · n=128 (turmeric itself appears in 1,457 recipes)
7. strawberry — PPMI 1.55 · ×4.7 chance · n=94 (strawberry itself appears in 1,105 recipes)
8. banana — PPMI 1.52 · ×4.6 chance · n=85 (banana itself appears in 1,032 recipes)

Cook the pairing

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

• Kacchi Gosht ki Biryani (Raw-Marinated Goat under Rice) — with mint, cardamom, turmeric
• Butter Chicken (Murgh Makhani) — with cardamom, fenugreek
• Rogan Josh — with cardamom, lamb
• Spicy Fish Curry — with mint, turmeric
• Falafel with Roasted Tomato and Yogurt Sauce — with grape, mint
• Chicken Shawarma Pita Wraps — with grape, turmeric

How this was measured

yogurt appears in 1,146 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.