The Chemistry Behind Great Food Pairings Red wine and steak, soda and burgers, pickles and pastrami sandwiches - these are combinations that just work. Now researchers provide a scientific explanation for why these unions are appealing to the tongue. Astringents like red wine and pickles balance out the grease of steaks and pastrami. "They cancel each other out, so to speak," said Paul Breslin, a sensory biologist at Rutgers University and at the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia, and one of the authors of a study in the journal Current Biology. Dr. Breslin has long been interested in how food attributes like fattiness, creaminess and astringency affect our mouths. "We want our mouth to be lubricated just right," he said. Our saliva does it because of the proteins it produces. Greasy food causes overlubrication and leaves an unpleasant slippery feeling on the tongue. On the other hand, drinking very dry wine or strong tea or eating acidic fruit causes the proteins to be precipitated out, creating an equally unpleasant dry sensation. Dr. Breslin and his colleagues asked testers to sample salami and then rinse their mouths with either tea or water. They were asked whether the rinses reduced the sensation of fattiness from the salami. Water did not work well, but the tea seemed to to neutralize the feeling. They also found that even weak astringents like tea can have a strong countering effect to greasy food when sipped over time. "This is like a fundamental, universal, global principle of gastronomy you see all over the world," Dr. Breslin said. If you ask a chef, they'd say they know about this already. What's interesting now is we have an explanation of why this is happening.