Niki Segnit's The Flavor Thesaurus is a handbook for connoisseurs of flavor, ingredients, and interesting combinations between them. Structured in the form of a glossary indexed by flavor or ingredient, the handbook offers suggestions for delicious, unusual, and unexpected pairings to spice up your next meal. This project is a visualization of the pairing data provided in that book, offering a way of visually exploring interesting flavor combinations and the relationships between them.

In this visualization, flavor pairings are represented by a cross-tabulated matrix with rows and columns corresponding to individual flavors or ingredients. This particular matrix is an adjacency matrix, meaning that column and row headers are redundant, giving the visualization diagonal symmetry. Each individual flavor is assigned to a specific flavor class in The Flavor Thesaurus (i.e., meaty, fruity, or roasted), and each column or row header is colored according to these classes, using the same color scheme provided in the book. Look up individual flavors or ingredients by column or row, and hover over labels, flavor classes, and pairings to explore more. Each 2-flavor pairing — that is, each square inside the matrix — is colored in proportion to the number of 3-flavor pairings that are possible with the given two flavors; darker squares indicate more possible pairings and triplets. When you click on any square/flavor pairing, a list of additional suggested pairings for each component flavor as well as for both flavors together is provided so you can explore and build your own.

This visualization was built in D3.js by Steven Braun. The data used to create this visualization are based on text presented in The Flavor Thesaurus, written by Niki Segnit. The code for this project is freely available on GitHub.