> Salted cucumbers, sugar, and yogurt

Isn't that cucumber raita, more or less?

When scrounging, I tend to assume that "The Incompatible Food Triad" hypothesis is false ;) But then, I've eaten some strange stuff. Spicy shredded beef fried crispy in sugar syrup, say. Hot-pepper chocolate ice cream.

I agree. The article isn't consistent. It references the

> Lemon, cocoa, and curry don’t sound great, but it’s not too hard to imagine a decent lemon mole sauce.

> Salted cucumbers, sugar, and yogurt might work, but if you count the salt, that’s four ingredients, not three.

Mole sauces seem to contain quite a bit more than 3 ingredients, such as chili peppers [1]. If salt counts as a single ingredient, then surely a mole sauce is extremely disqualified. Sugar should also be considered an ingredient.

> Tiffany Inglis, a programmer and digital artist, took some time a few years ago to design a lemon affogato, in order to patently prove that a top Incompatible Food Triad contender—espresso, lemon, and milk—wasn’t so bad after all.

Here is the list of 5-8 ingredients in that affogato [2]:

- 1 cup milk

- 1cup sugar

- ¼ cup condensed milk

- 5 egg yolks, lightly beaten

- 5tbsp lemon zest

- ½ cup fresh lemon juice

- 2 cups heavy cream

- 1 shot of espresso

In my opinion, the only reasonable way of approaching this problem is to strictly limit what counts as an ingredient and to carefully limit the amount of preparation involved to count ingredients as "paired". This way, pickles actually count as two ingredients, due to the vinegar involved. Sugar also cannot be assumed as a glue to bind the triad together. "Curry", being a mixture, could also not count as an ingredient. Therefore, I propose my own solution:

chili powder + espresso = spicy espresso

espresso + lemon juice = sour espresso

chili powder + diluted lemon juice = spicy lemonade

chili power + lemon juice + espresso = spicy sour espresso (bad)

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mole_sauce

[2]: https://www.theguardian.com/science/alexs-adventures-in-numb...

>> Salted cucumbers, sugar, and yogurt might work, but if you count the salt, that’s four ingredients, not three. You might not like the thought of potatoes, mayonnaise and cabbage, but someone has invented a corned beef salad that has all three.

>So, which is it? "More than 3 ingredients doesn't count" or "it counts as long as it contains all 3"?

Not sure what the confusion is, but neither of the two examples counts as "three foods where any two of those foods taste good together, but all three combined taste disgusting". The first example fails (if you count the salt) because it has four foods, not three. The second example fails because someone has made a (presumably non-disgusting) recipe with all three combined.

The addition of other ingredients is required to make an actual dish containing the relevant pairs. So it doesn't matter if A and B, B and C, and A and C all taste good together; if A, B, C, D, E, F and G together taste good, that's counterexample like the corned beef salad. But, the first point is talking about ingredients A, B and C, C and D, and A, B and D, where A is salt and B is cucumber; this is not a triad. Also, the recipes with A and B together would presumable contain A, B and P, Q and R; A, C, S, T and U; B, C, V, W and X; that is, each combination is used to make a dish that has other, ancillary ingredients.

The question is about flavors, not specific food items.