Fascinating: Cooking by Chemistry

The snippet below is from the KQED Bay Area Bites web site. I took a look through the Food for Design site and if nothing else it's provocative. There are two main parts to the site but it's hard to navigate between the two so I posted links below to both sections. One contains the food maps which link foods together based upon their molecular composition. The other has recipes based upon the molecular linkages...some of which are rather odd combinations but you'll never know if they work 'til ya try 'em!

Blueberries and oysters? Chocolate and cauliflower? Blue cheese and rhubarb and pineapple?

If taste buds could cringe, then mine were recoiled into a wincing mess when I first learned about these flavor pairings. To help wake up my outdated taste buds, Food for Design chemists and chefs and some overachieving web designers are putting together a provocative, highly entertaining website. With just a few minutes of clicking, creative and courageous cooks can find some very unusual food pairings.

Bernard Lahousse and Lieven De Couvreur in Belgium are the masterminds behind Food for Design. Based on the simple premise that "food combines with each other when they have major flavour components in common," their postings attempt to pair foods according to their physicochemical properties. If two ingredients share common sequences or similar molecules, the thinking goes, then their overlapping flavor compounds will echo each other.

Food maps site
Recipes site