Black bean paste + Mala sauce
Black bean paste and mala sauce are a complementary pair — they appear together in recipes often (cooc 0.37) despite differing aroma chemistry (chem 0.35). The combination works through contrast rather than similarity. Both sit inside the "East Asian umami pantry staples" 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 black bean paste and mala sauce — 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.
- Cooks withEast Asian umami pantry staples
- Cooks withEast Asian umami sauces and condiments
- Cooks withEast Asian hot pot ingredients
- BlendedEast Asian fermented sauces and processed staples
- BlendedEast Asian savory sauces and condiments
- Tastes likeEast Asian processed condiments and sauces
- Tastes likeEast Asian savory sauces and condiments
- Tastes likeChinese wok cooking essentials