culinary-ingredients

name	culinary-ingredients
description	Use when picking aromatic foundations for a target cuisine, finding traditional or molecular flavor pairings for an ingredient, identifying functional roles (acid / fat / salt / umami / heat / sweet) needed in a dish, or substituting ingredients across cuisines while preserving their functional role.

Culinary Ingredients

Reasoning about ingredients: what they bring, what they pair with, and what role they fill in a dish.

When the chef agent calls this skill

Invoked in the GROUNDING and RESEARCH phases. Match the question to one of the procedures below.

"What aromatic base does this cuisine use?"

1. Open reference.md → Section 1: Aromatic Foundations
2. Identify the cuisine (and the closest regional variant if it's specified, e.g. Honduran vs. Salvadoran sofrito)
3. Return: ingredient ratios + build technique + the chemistry that makes it work (sulfur compounds in alliums, terpenes in carrots/celery, pyrazine development from gentle browning)

"What pairs with X?"

1. Open reference.md → Section 2: Flavor Affinities & Pairings
2. Find the ingredient (or its functional category if it's not listed by name)
3. Return: traditional partners with the cuisines that use them + molecular pairing rationale (shared volatile aromatic compounds, foodpairing logic)

"What functional roles need to be filled in this dish?"

1. Open reference.md → Section 3: Functional Categories
2. Six roles to consider for every dish: acid, fat, salt, umami, heat, sweet
3. For each, return candidates appropriate to the target cuisine, with intensity notes (chile Scoville, vinegar pH, glutamate concentration)

"Substitute X while preserving its role"

1. Identify what X is doing in the source dish (consult Section 3 functional categories)
2. Find equivalents in the target cuisine that fill the same role
3. Return ranked options + the trade-off each substitution makes (e.g. parmesan → fish sauce: same umami, different texture and salt level)

Worked example

Cuisine: Central American (Honduran). Star ingredient: pinto beans.

• Aromatic base: Latin sofrito (onion, garlic, sweet pepper) + regional epazote
• Functional roles to fill: heat (chile cobanero), acid (lime or curtido), fat (manteca or rendered pork fat), umami (cured pork, cooking-liquid concentration), salt (sea salt), aromatic herb (epazote, cilantro)

Reference

The full lookup tables, chemistry, and worked examples live in reference.md. When you read a section, cite the H2 heading so the user (and downstream tooling) can trace the recommendation back to source.