Welcome to Flavor Tool!

Selecting ingredients

• Each circle represents an ingredient that could go in your stir-fry. The ingredients are color-coded:
• green=vegetable
• orange=fruit
• brown=protein
• tan=grain
• grey=other
• Mark ingredients to include by hovering over an ingredient and pressing 'select' (or clicking).
• You can mark the ingredients you for sure want by pressing 'lock' (or double-clicking).
• To see which ingredients pair well together, try pressing 'connect' (or right-clicking).
• black=strong pair
• grey=weaker pair

Generating recipes

• Once you've selected some ingredients and locked the ones you for sure want to include, try pressing one of the "generate" buttons(or hitting spacebar).
• The generator draws on pairings and other data* to select a handful of ingredients that might go well together.
• If you like a generated recipe but want to keep playing around, the 'save' and 'load' buttons will let you save and switch between projects.
• When you're ready to get cooking, just hit 'Get recipe' to plug the selected ingredients into a template** for cooking tasty stir-frys.

Enjoy! :-)

*gratefully gathered from The Vegetarian Flavor Bible (Page, 2014)

**shamelessly adapted from Tassajara Cooking (Brown, 1974)

Ingredients:

Notes:

• Stir-frying (aka sautéing) mostly involves frying vegetables in oil, over high heat. To do it by the book (specifically Tassajara Cooking, Brown 1974), the veg must be dry and not piled up; if the pieces don't have continuous contact with the pan, the ones on top will be steaming. For crunchy veg like broccoli you'll want to turn off the heat while it's still a little undercooked, since it'll keep cooking some while it cools down.
• Timing and seasoning are the big challenges for me, and it's even trickier with the diversity (and sometimes weirdness) of generated recicpes. The best I can offer is:
1. Cook in stages (onions, oil, stuff you really want fried; tough veg; soft veg and fruit and seasoning; more seasoning & maybe garnish).
2. Balance flavors (savory, salty, sweet, sour, spicy, bitter).
3. Season slowly and, if you've got fresh veg to show off, sparingly.
• On herbs/spices: these can be added mid or late. Adding earlier means more flavor blending, later means more flavor. And ground up stuff takes less cooking.

Instructions:

1. Pre: Heat pan, then add oil. Just barely cover the pan, a little goes a long way.
2. Early stage (4-8 mins): Add stuff like onions, that you really want to caramelize and/or fry. I like to add any mushrooms in at this stage, to get that strong nutty flavor. Tofu and potatoes can also fit here, especially with larger chunks. Eggplant too, but that's complicated.
3. Mid stage (3-4 mins): Add tough veg (including onion & mushroom if you skipped the previous step). Springle with salt then toss veg, lightly coating each piece with salt and oil. Also add any seasonings that you want to soak in or that are tough, eg. anice seeds.
4. Late stage (2-3 mins): Add more delicate veg, like spinach or peas. Also fruit (that you don't want as garnish) and any remaining seasonings that need cooking (like powders). Add stuff with complex flavors that could be destroyed by lotsa heat, like chiles/vinegar/truffles/fennel root. Nuts and seeds if you want to toast them (which I recommend).
5. Flavoring: Salt, vinegar, tamari - whatever's needed to get the taste you want. Also things that don't need cooking - fruits, nuts, seeds, fennel, stuff like that. It can be fun to use garnishes (eg. chopped chives, fennel, mint, lemon slices) to make a plate of food look pretty!
6. Sides: if a generated recipe includes fruits, grains and/or beans/peas/lentils, these can be added in late or served as a side/topping. Sides can be a great way to balance or contrast flavors, textures and temperatures.

Bon voyage! :-)