The Miracle of Miracle Fruit, Pt. 1
Our good friend Mr. Meatballs gave us some miracle fruit tablets a couple of months back and Jackie and I are finally getting around to having our first taste test.
But what’s miracle fruit? Well, it’s a berry found in West Africa that certain tribes were known to chew before meals. Essentially, after you eat it, it makes sour foods taste sweet. But how? Wikipedia take it away!:
“The berry contains an active glycoprotein molecule, with some trailing carbohydrate chains, called miraculin. When the fleshy part of the fruit is eaten, this molecule binds to the tongue’s taste buds, causing sour foods to taste sweet. While the exact cause for this change is unknown, one hypothesis is that the effect may be caused if miraculin works by distorting the shape of sweetness receptors “so that they become responsive to acids, instead of sugar and other sweet things”. This effect lasts between thirty minutes and two hours.“
We have ours in tablet form (made from miracle fruit powder and corn starch). So we prepped some foods, then popped in the tablets, let them dissolve on our tongues and dug in.
We tried lemons, limes, grapefruit, granny smith apples, wine, gin, Persian yogurt, dill pickles, white nectarines, pamesan cheese, cream cheese and pita chips. So?
It’s a little insane. The sour fruits were sweeter, but it wasn’t the most satisfying sweetness in the world. It was sort of like eating an out-of-season fruit that was jacked up with some kind of hormones so that they tasted sweeter, but not totally correct. The limes tasted like artificially sweetened (but very sweet) limeade. The lemons kept a little more of their sour taste, but the disorienting part is that the back of your throat still treats it like a really sour fruit, even though it tastes sweet on your tongue.
Green apples were just plain confusing, while the cheeses and pickles and gin tasted mostly the same. The riesling was so sweet it was undrinkable. But the real standout of the whole adventure was the pita chips dipped in tart, Persian yogurt. It tasted like a delightful honey custard with a salty crunch underneath.
The net result of the adventure? A really unhappy and acid-riddled stomach.
