Meat is a meat with 87 known flavor compounds. The most distinctive molecule is heptadienal. It pairs most strongly with onion, sharing 31 flavor compounds. Meat appears in 18,814 recipes, most commonly in indian cuisine.
Raw pork splits between green-fatty and green-waxy notes. Octanal and nonanal described as citrusy. Cooking develops meaty Maillard flavours.
Compounds ranked by rarity — the higher the score, the more distinctive to this ingredient.
Of the ~226 molecules that drive perceived food aroma (Dunkel et al. 2014), Meat's inventory contains 25. Most of the other 62 compounds are below detection threshold.
+ 13 more — showing top 12 by class and threshold.
Generalist = appears in >25% of foods (Maillard / fermentation products). Individualist = appears in <5% of foods (carries signature notes). Threshold values are in clean water — the actual perception threshold in a food matrix can differ substantially.
How Meat's 87 known compounds break down by aroma category. Percentages are of compounds with a known label.
48 of 87 are distinctive to meat — they appear in under 10% of foods. The remainder are the background most foods share.
Ordered by measured impact in meat — concentration against odour threshold where both are published, then by how distinctive the molecule is across the graph. Molecules measured here but not established as odorants sit below those that are.
Ranked by median concentration across published studies. Only 1 of Meat's 87 compounds have a measured concentration in the literature — the rest are confirmed present but not yet quantified. Bars are log-scaled.
Ranked by how often cooks actually use them together, across 453,403 recipes — the familiar answer first. Each pairing still carries its molecular score and shared-compound count; only the ORDER differs. Counts cover every characterised molecule the two ingredients have in common, not only the aroma-active ones, so they can exceed an ingredient’s aroma-compound count. For the chemistry-first view — where the surprising pairings live — see the molecular network below, the side-by-side comparison, or the Pairing Tool.
Meat and its 10 closest compound-sharing relatives. Spoke thickness = shared compounds; circle size = that ingredient's own compound count. Drag to rearrange, scroll to zoom, click to open.
Compare Meat side-by-side
Drawn from PubMed + Europe PMC + food-science journals. Click any title to read the full abstract on the original source.
Native Chinese pig breeds are highly valued for their superior meat quality and distinct flavor characteristics. This study compared the volatile organic compound (VOC) profiles of... Read abstract →
<h4>Background</h4>In recent years, there has been an increasing demand for high-quality dried aquatic products that possess similar organoleptic and nutritional qualities to their... Read abstract →
The sous-vide technique is increasingly used to improve the quality of poultry meat; the study aimed to compare the quality of traditional and sous-vide marinated (SVM) duck drumst... Read abstract →
Age has a significant impact on goat meat flavor. However, reporting the effects of age on free amino acid (FAAs), lipid profiles and aromas of goat meat is limited. Here, the FAAs... Read abstract →
The practice of surgical castration of piglets and its alternatives is still under debate. Production of boars may impair meat quality due to boar taint and reduced tenderness comp... Read abstract →
