Tomato is a vegetable fruit with 518 known flavor compounds. The most distinctive molecule is 2-phenylethyl isobutyrate. It pairs most strongly with garlic, sharing 243 flavor compounds. Tomato appears in 32,160 recipes, most commonly in indian cuisine.
Predominantly green grassy with fruity, rose-like floral and vegetable aromas. Caramelic and buttery notes. Potato and onion vegetable notes.
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), Tomato's inventory contains 80. Most of the other 438 compounds are below detection threshold.
+ 68 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 Tomato's 518 known compounds break down by aroma category. Percentages are of compounds with a known label.
239 of 518 are distinctive to tomato — they appear in under 10% of foods. The remainder are the background most foods share.
Ordered by measured impact in tomato — 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 50 of Tomato's 518 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.
Tomato 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 Tomato side-by-side
Drawn from PubMed + Europe PMC + food-science journals. Click any title to read the full abstract on the original source.
Flavor serves as a key quality indicator in tomato puree (TP) processing; however, conventional methods often fall short in providing rapid and accurate assessments. To address thi... Read abstract →
Bacterial wilt of tomato caused by Ralstonia solanacearum is a critical soilborne disease that drastically reduces yield. In the current study, an endophytic strain NEAU-CP5 with s... Read abstract →
N6-methyladenosine (m6A) is a fundamentally important RNA modification for gene regulation, whose function is achieved through m6A readers. However, whether and how m6A readers pla... Read abstract →
Tomatoes grown in an experimental greenhouse were sprayed with 13 selected pesticides at the recommended field doses, and used for pickle processing. Three different pickle process... Read abstract →
GC × GC-O-TOF-MS and GC-IMS have attracted increasing attention in complex food flavor analysis due to their high resolution and sensitivity. However, very few studies have attempt... Read abstract →
