About a year and a half ago, I found a TV show called “Future Food” on the Planet Green channel that I quickly got sucked into. It was a glimpse into the world of molecular gastronomy, only it had a bit of a twist. The owners of MOTO take molecular gastronomy down a path to seek out alternatives for future eating. Alternatives that maybe conserve energy or reduce waste. It’s a fascinating show. Well. One episode that sucked me in explored some of the potential uses for Miracle Fruit. Miracle Fruit is just what it sounds like- a miracle. It uses a chemical called miraculin that physically alters the taste buds of someone who consumes this berry. It resembles a cranberry in appearance, but supposedly tastes rather bland.
The episode I saw on Future Food had the MOTO team design a tasting menu where miracle fruit was utilized to alter the tastes of what was actually being eaten. It was incredible- because the challenge was ultimately to go through the environment (read:people’s yards) and find plants that we don’t normally consume- but aren’t harmful- and turn them into something delicious. Using the miracle fruit, MOTO accomplished just that, and the diners were incredulous to discover that they were eating twigs and grass and leaves, when the food before them tastes like a five-star meal. It was amazing!
So my Dad heard about this Miracle Fruit and an idea was born. We needed to try this miracle fruit. Needed to! So it was decided that on our annual camping vacation, we would play with miracle fruit. I was put on the detail to figure out what foods we should eat with the Miracle Fruit, and Dad would procure the miracle fruit. For our purposes, he bought tablets, which are made from freeze dried miracle fruits. We were to take one of these tablets on our tongue and let them slowly dissolve. They definitely took their time dissolving! They tasted themselves, like a very bland cranberry, but the more we sucked on them, the closer the flavor crept towards a raspberry flavor. We rubbed those tablets all over our tongues while they dissolved, because we really wanted this to work. All told, it was a good 5-10 minutes before any of us were ready to move on to the tasting.
Miracle Fruit is supposed to make sour foods taste sweet, and it’s also supposed to tame heat. So for sour foods we had rhubarb, lemons, limes, plain pourable yogurt and sour patch kids. For hot we had a jar of HOT giardiniera, radishes, Chili-infused dark chocolate, and Hot Tamales. We also added blueberries, Coke, Bottle Caps candy, baby carrots and diced tomatoes.
Mom was the first one brave enough to take a taste and she headed straight for the rhubarb. When she started exclaiming about how delicious it was, everyone stopped hesitating and headed for the sample table.
To be honest, I can’t entirely tell you how these foods tasted with the miracle fruit. It was truly bizarre! The rhubarb had lost almost all of it’s sourness and tasted as if it had been bathed in sugar. The lemons and the limes were sweet as candy- I think my niece Kara ate an entire lime by herself, it was that good. The Sour Patch Kids tasted as though they’d been dipped in sugar instead of the sour powder coating they’re usually wrapped in. The pourable yogurt, however, I found didn’t have any change. It still tasted like yogurt- maybe slightly sweeter than the plain that it was, but the acidic tang was definitely still there.
The blueberries actually became too sweet to eat- as did the animal crackers that came out later. The tomatoes too. I know some people are fond of tomatoes sprinkled with a but of sugar… I am not one of those, and I didn’t care for them at all. The Coke became too sweet as well, though the kids seemed to think it quite tasty.
The baby carrots were kind of our control food it turned out, because they tasted completely normal. The sweetness wasn’t enhanced, and their flavor with the Miracle Fruit was the same without.
The hot foods were a different experience. We’d never had the chili chocolate or the giardiniera, so at the time, we thought they were simply delicious. We didn’t know how hot the peppers in the giardiniera were, but a few of us thought that though our mouths didn’t experience heat, our bellies did. Later we discovered that Miracle Fruit definitely hides the heat. That pickled pepper mix was HOT, I tell you! The chocolate, with Miracle Fruit, simply tasted like a good dark chocolate. It wasn’t until we ate it later that we discovered there was a bit of chili and a bit of heat at the back of the tongue.
And yet, the radishes didn’t seem to change either. They were still zippy- as were the Hot Tamales candies. My unscientific hypothesis is that the miraculin affects capsaicin in hot peppers and chilies, but not other sources of heat- such as the radishes and the cinnamon candies. It also works only on certain kinds of acids- in particular, citric acid, while lactic acid didn’t seem to be affected by it.
It was truly fascinating. While we were still amped up on the miracle fruit (which can last from 20 minutes to 2 hours) we moved on to some, uh, more unusual foods, as my brother headed into the woods and brought back leaves and twigs. Yes, my friends, we ate leaves. The oak leaves tasted a lot like raisins and the maple leaves tasted like clover. The oak leaves explain a lot in my mind, because my grandfather makes wine from oak leaves, and I always wondered where that came from. It’s because the leaves actually do taste a bit like a raisin- even when not experiencing a miracle fruit alteration.
When we were all finished, we brewed up a few pots of coffee, as the acidity of hot coffee is supposed to wash away the tongue-coating properties of Miracle Fruit, and indeed, it worked it’s magic rather quickly. Within a few hours we were mostly back to normal, although for some of us, it seemed like it took until the next day for our taste buds to really get back to normal.
The Miracle Fruit experiment was a blast, and I am actually very glad we chose to do the experiment camping. Because of our location in the middle of the woods, we couldn’t rummage through the fridge and pantry and simply taste one of everything. This way, we were selective and I think we had a nice array to really explore some of the possibilities with the Miracle Fruit. It was also something everyone could participate in. While the youngest of the kids did not participate, Zander and Abigail both grabbed hold of the opportunity and joined in the fun too. It really was a fun family activity, now that I think of it. If you’re curious about organizing your own Miracle Fruit tasting- simply google “Food Tripping” or “Miracle Fruit Party” and you’ll find all kinds of inspiration and ideas.