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Have you heard the internet buzz about miracle fruit? At first when I heard people talking about it, I assumed it was the next amazing antioxidant that would make you live forever and tone your butt to boot. I was very excited to discover that it is actually a natural substance that radically alters the way you taste food.
When I first heard about miracle fruit, or miracle berries, I wondered what it was and how it worked. Once ingested orally, the compounds in the berries coat your tongue and make sour or bitter things taste sweet. According to Wikipedia, scientists are not even sure how miracle fruit works:
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 bitter and 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.
Apparently the berries do not survive well off the bush, and perish in a day or two. The most common way to find them or get them is in a manufactured tablet form. The berries are native to tropical West Africa where they have been used by people there as a flavor enhancer for hundreds of years:
A French explorer known as the Chevalier des Marchais first encountered the effects in 1725 somewhere in West Africa, says Adam Gollner, who is writing a book about miracle fruit. The chevalier saw villagers eat the berry before consuming gruel and palm wine, so he gave it a try himself.
In the U.S., miracle fruit was "rediscovered" in the 1970s. American Entrepreneur Robert Harvey attempted to incorporate miraculin into food to reduce or eliminate the need for sugar:
Harvey and his colleagues were able to process the berry's 'miracle' ingredient to make it marketable. So his company conducted their first practical miracle berry trial. They coated some sugarless ice lollies with the berry process. Then they took sugar-coated ice lollies, mixed the two brands up and handed them out to schoolchildren in a Boston playground. Result? All the kids preferred the Miracle Berry lollies to the sugared ones, not only making the key marketing point but also showing that the berry is a taste enhancer.
Harvey's dreams of a healthy sugar substitute were dashed in 1974 when the Food and Drug Administration, which was set to approve of the berry as a "food product" quickly turned on him and declared it a "food additive," meaning that the active ingredient of miracle berries would be locked up in testing for years to come. There have been whispers that the sugar industry moved to quash the introduction of such a strong competitor to the market, but this rumor has never been proved.
Now that I had a little background on this wondrous new (to me) product, I had to give it a whirl. Order strange pills off the internet in the name of a food adventure? Heck yes! I read around on bulletin boards and found a site that people claimed was reputable, and received my package from them in about two weeks. I was excited and intrigued! The customs notes and labels told me that my package had traveled through Taiwan and Slovenia.
Inside the envelope, I found a couple of boxes. I really enjoyed that the manufacturer referred to them as "mysterious." The ingredients were even listed as "mysterious fruit powder and [non-mysterious] cornstarch."
The tablets were a non-threatening shade of pink.
Before we could do any tasting, we had to prepare ourselves! We gathered a large variety of sour or bitter foods to taste, and threw in some sweet and salty items as well, in the name of science. These experiements are also called "flavor tripping parties."
We chose vinegars, fish sauce, pepperoni, citrus, unsweetened yogurt, cheese, semi-sweet chocolate chips, and more.
The dissolving part was pretty painless. I tested the first one on this three-year-old I bought on ebay for this purpose.
