How the Designer Works

The Pickle & Ferment Designer is the only tool on this site that reaches outside your browser. It combines two things: a process transform model and a live aroma-pairing graph, both served by the sister site pair.modernist.food.

The two halves

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1. The transform comes from a process model (the real PROCESS_DATABASE shared with the pairing app). Each process — lacto-fermentation, pickling, vinegar-making, curing, drying, smoking, aging — carries the aroma compounds it generates and reduces, its shift to the Salt/Acid/Fat/Heat profile, and its effect on a set of fault dimensions (rancid, sulfur, bitter, astringent, pungent, metallic, acrid, fermented). Pickling, for example, fades fresh green aldehydes, lifts acid and salt, and nudges up pungent and ferment character.

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2. The pairings come from the same flavor graph that powers pair.modernist.food: ingredients are linked by the aroma compounds they share. Because a fermented vegetable tastes nothing like its raw self, the Designer pairs it through its real fermented counterpart in the graph where one exists — cabbage through kimchi, garlic through black garlic, chili through gochujang — so the suggestions reflect the actual fermented product, not the fresh vegetable.

Why a counterpart instead of a synthetic variant

The process model and the ingredient graph use different vocabularies for aroma compounds, so simply “adding fermentation compounds” to a fresh vegetable wouldn’t change its pairings in a meaningful way. Routing through a real fermented ingredient that already lives in the graph keeps every pairing grounded in real data rather than a guess.

It degrades gracefully

The Designer fetches live from pair.modernist.food. If that request can’t complete — you’re offline, or the service is briefly unavailable — it falls back to a small bundled snapshot so the page still works, and tells you it’s showing saved data. The transform values are computed the same way either way; only the breadth of live pairings is reduced.

Note

The Designer is about flavor and aroma. Salt %, pH, fermentation timing, and safety come from the calculators and Safety First — those are never decided by a pairing score.

Behind the scenes

The pairing engine exposes three endpoints the Designer uses:

• GET /api/processes — the fermentation/preservation processes and their transforms
• GET /api/processes/:code — one process in full
• GET /api/ferment/design?base=&process= — a base vegetable plus a process, returning the transform and live pairings for the fermented result

These extend the existing public pairing API and are shared with any tool — including Claude via the Modernist Food MCP — that wants to reason about fermented ingredients.