Jew's ear + Wax apple

Auricularia auricula-judae, known as the Jew's ear, wood ear, jelly ear or by a number of other common names, is a species of edible Auriculariales fungus found worldwide. The fruiting body is distinguished by its noticeably ear-like shape and brown colouration; it grows upon wood, especially elder. Its specific epithet is derived from the belief that Judas Iscariot hanged himself from an elder tree; the common name "Judas's ear" eventually became "Jew's ear", while today "jelly ear" and other names are sometimes used. The fungus can be found throughout the year in temperate regions worldwide, where it grows upon both dead and living wood.
Syzygium samarangense (syn. Eugenia javanica) is a plant species in the Myrtaceae, native to an area that includes the Greater Sunda Islands , Malay Peninsula and the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, but introduced in prehistoric times to a wider area and now widely cultivated in the tropics. English common names include Jambu air (local Indonesian and Malay name), Champoo (a transliteration of the Thai name), lembu or lian-woo (from the native Taiwanese name; Chinese: 蓮霧; pinyin: liánwù; Pe̍h-ōe-jī: ... and Malay name), wax apple, love apple, java apple, royal apple, bell fruit (or bellfruit), Jamaican apple, water apple, mountain apple, cloud apple, wax jambu, and rose apple. It is commonly known as makopa in the Philippines.
Shared flavor compounds
These compounds appear in both Jew's ear and Wax apple, giving them a molecular basis for flavor affinity, the pairing principle articulated by Francois Benzi and implemented in flavor-pairing research.
Why it works
The flavor-pairing hypothesis proposes that ingredients sharing significant aromatic compounds harmonize on the palate. Jew's ear and Wax apple overlap on 20 key compound(s), which is why classic culinary traditions, and our deterministic matching algorithm, place them together.
- Pairing computed by: pairing-compute
- Methodology: deterministic compound-overlap matching (no LLM)
- Compound data: Wikidata + Wikidata
- Part of: Living Gastronomic Intelligence graph