Unlock the Possibilities of Culinary Creativity with The Flavor Matrix: A Guide to Combining Everyday Ingredients for Exceptional Results

Gaudfridius: This is a quality book. Brief introduction providing the necessary and a well-rounded overview of information and theory informing the rest of the book. Simple layout, easy to understand and use and has already led to some awesome culinary innovations for one who is not otherwise particularly talented in the kitchen. Love it. No pretentious drivel to wade through in order to get to the useful information, unlike so many other books on flavour and spices. Well done; this book has earned a permanent home in my kitchen :)

Canada on Oct 31, 2023

Stuey Mon: Over all, good book. There's no real shortage of idea starters here. I write a lot of recipes, and a lot of menu's, and this book definitely helps with the creative spark. Take-away, if you like coming up with your own ideas when cooking, buy it, you more than likely will not regret it.

My only real coral is...does it need more pictures? No, not necessarily. But I am still blown away with the amount of blank pages in this book. It is littered with black pages with designs on them, leaving me with the feeling that this was a rushed print, or unfinished product. The photography is nice, and they could have added a lot more pictures or content instead of leaving pages completely blank (or just remove the page altogether, which disrupts the flow/layout they were going for, but still).

Canada on Sep 20, 2023

David Jaeger: Given as a gift to my Sous Chef daughter. It'll be interesting to see how she uses this information.

United States on Sep 11, 2023

Nathan Hoffeditz: This is a visually stunning books. It is great to display in your kitchen, and so far the three recipes I’ve tried have been very good… even the fish sauce peanut brittle. I’ve always loved cooking as well as science and this is an exciting combo of both. Highly recommended!

United States on Aug 09, 2023

Fernanda VeigaFernanda Veiga: O livro veio com defeito na capa. De resto tudo certo

Brazil on Mar 05, 2023

GB: This comment in English because that's the book's language. If you can not read this, do not bother purchasing the book - as it requires a well deep understanding of the techinical terms to be properly understood.

(ce commentaire est en anglais car le livre est écrit en cette langue, et le comprendre demande une connaissance approfondie des termes techniques - si vous n'arrivez pas à lire ce commentaire, n'achetez pas le livre! Il finirait comme cale sous un meuble...)

The author of "flavor matrix" spent years (is what they say, and I tend to believe it seen the result) studying the flavoring composition of various ingredients. Then they compiled tables with this data, and used that data to identify foodstuff that had similar flavoring compounds, and thus "ought to" pair well with each other.

This is the basis of the now widespread "flavor pairing" theory and, although it's far from representing all the possibilities in food pairing, it helps nonetheless to open up the mind for professionals or even amateur cooks who more often than not are enclosed in their routinely cooking, using pretty much always the same ingredients in the same kind of...

France on Aug 18, 2022

M.M.: Edit: The most liked review barrage no longer applies to the current most liked review.

This book is not for people looking for recipes. The person who wrote the most liked review of this book has misunderstood the concept and reasoning one would get into this brain exercising and creativity releasing book. If you don’t own the Flavor Bible, start with that, what that book helps people understand is... flavors, duh. It’s considerably more home cook driven and much easier to relate to. This book will open your eyes to flavors and unusual pairings that would be more on the level of a seasoned cook, and I don’t mean red lobster, or outback, I mean people that have committed to the hospitality industry and have worked their way up to a professional cooking level, as a career, as a passion. Very rarely is a person who cooks well at home going to find the reason to put bergamot, eucalyptus, etc, etc into their food because, well, it’s intimidating and will rattle their brain more so then help them understand how what they just did even works to begin with.

This book lets your mind venture into the “I wonder ifs” and let’s you experiment with ideas that may be...

United States on Nov 05, 2020

Justin: I also have the flavor bible, as well as the vegetarian flavor bible and I can say it is not as thorough if you are looking for flavor combinations at a moments notice. It is however useful for inspiring flavor combinations that are seldom used by providing the reader with useful information about how flavors are perceived on a deeper level.
It goes into vague detail about various flavor compounds like sulfur, tannins, and several other aspects of taste that people rarely think about, but play a large role in the experience. It pairs this general knowledge with charts for almost every class of food you can think of (melons, mushrooms, alliums, etc.) and these charts show the likely hood of a successful pairing with other, more specific categories of food in a colorful. They follow up these charts in an effort to engage the reader with interesting recipes that will compel you to play with different flavors in a sophisticated way.
This is not the best reference (compared to the flavor bible) but it does contribute where the flavor bible is lacking, with insight on how and why these flavors work to stimulate the palate.

United States on Dec 13, 2019

Mr Sprinkler: I purchased this book for a project we are creating around food. So far I have found it to be quite helpful in understanding and determining which foods work well together and for idea inspiration. It has actually boosted my own culinary creativity in the kitchen and given me many ideas.

Once you understand how flavours work together then cooking will become so much easier and fun.

United Kingdom on Sep 14, 2018

24HourPickles: First off, this is a beautiful book. The pictures are lovely, the printing and finish are nice, and a lot of time and effort surely went into the multitude of well-done graphs you'll find throughout. Unfortunately, like many a beautiful thing, it also lacks for substance.

Many of the mentioned flavors/food items have but one recipe to them. In other words, say I wanted to make some kind of sweet desert using garden peas. I can look up garden peas, and find several complimentary sweet flavors to experiment with using the graphs, but there's only one garden pea recipe in the book, and (surprising to me for a book touting unusual flavor combinations) the recipe is a fairly pedestrian savory pork taco dish. Would you expect to find garden peas in a taco? Probably not. How about in a strawberry shortcake desert? No way in hell! While the book asserts the latter (strawberries and peas go well with each other) it has only a recipe for the more underwhelming former. I'd expect at least two recipes per ingredient, one maybe slightly daring and one really out there, not a fairly common practical usage recipe.

Furthermore, Unfortunately, I find several of my own oft-used...

United States on Apr 09, 2018