Bay leaf + Star anise
Bay leaf and star anise are a complementary pair — they appear together in recipes often (cooc 0.36) despite differing aroma chemistry (chem 0.40). The combination works through contrast rather than similarity. Both sit inside the "Mediterranean aromatic herbs and spices" mode.
What do these scores mean?
Cooks-with (technical name: Cooc) measures how often the two ingredients appear in the same dish across 4M recipes. Tastes-like (Chem) measures how much aroma chemistry they share via FlavorDB. Blended (Core) combines both. All are cosine similarities in 300-D space — practical ranges differ per axis, so see the per-row context to read them.
Ingredients that go well with both bay leaf and star anise — candidates for completing the dish.
How this is ranked
Each candidate scores against both ingredients in the recipe co-occurrence embedding. We sort by the worse of the two scores, so the result fits the weaker partner — not just one of them.
Clusters that contain both ingredients — click through to see everything in the mode.
- BlendedMediterranean aromatic herbs and spices
- BlendedAromatic bitter spices and herbs
- Tastes likeSouth and Southeast Asian savory spices and pulses
- Tastes likeAromatic woody-citrus spices and herbs
- Tastes likeWoody aromatic spices and herbs
- Tastes likeAromatic herbs and warm spices
- Tastes likeSouth Asian bitter aromatic spices
- Tastes likeEuropean savory herbs and game