There are so many flavor combinations, I cannot possibly list them all. These are ideas to combine and create things that you can’t find as a recipe elsewhere or to add to existing ideas:
Fruit like apples and bananas with cheese. Crisp, slightly tart apples go well with the soft creamy richness of cranberry cheese and medium cheddar.
One of my favorite foods growing up was Pasta Roni four cheese noodles. It was basically high quality mac and cheese. The problem was, it had two temperatures: burn your mouth worse than pizza, and race to stuff your face before it becomes cold. I’m not sure how my solution came about, but I still enjoy it to this day. I use apple sauce and dip the noodles in to cool them and add flavor. I guess now that I’m thinking about it, it’s like a reverse fondue. In using it for the first half of the noodles, the second half are nice and ready to eat if you choose to continue without more sauce.
Cheese/cream cheese and spicy go well together, the creaminess tempering the heat. Sriracha, jalapenos, and spicy jelly are examples.
- Creamy (dairy)/spicy
- Salty/sweet
- Fruit/cheese
- Meat/potatoes/cooked veggies
Restaurant menus are a great example of flavor combinations. Most things on their menus are paired and you can use them as a basis.
Another way to use them is to get to other combinations, as an example: cream cheese and jam go together (fruit and cheese), and jalapenos go with cream cheese (creamy and spicy). So things like jalapeno poppers go well with jellies like cranberry sauce. The flavors mesh together well and the jam and cheese temper the spicy heat of the jalapenos, while the chilled jam tempers the fresh out of the oven heat.