Miracle Fruit

Tabasco sauce tasting like hot jelly donut glaze? Lemons tasting like sweet candy? That is exacly what someone wrote in the New York Times about miracle fruit, which is also the reason why I had to try it.

I finally tried miracle fruit last month, and I've been meaning to write about it ever since.

It all started one day when I decided to clean out my inbox. In doing so, I found an old email from CK telling me about a wacky fruit he had read about that transforms your taste buds such that everything sour will taste sweet. Not only that, it seemed as though people were throwing 'taste tripping' parties to try out this so called miracle fruit. You pay a cover charge to eat the stuff, and when the properties in your mouth change, you go nuts tasting all sorts of different foods.

I originally tried buying the miracle fruit plant, but I just didn't have the patience to be put on a waiting list for 9 months. My next option was to buy the individual berries, but several companies told me that they probably wouldn't be able to clear Canadian customs in time for the berry to be eaten. Once picked off the tree, a miracle fruit berry must be consumed within 4 days for it to keep its properties.

By this point, I had already told people that I was going to throw a miracle fruit party, so I was seriously crunched for time. I would have put it off but I was meeting up with people who were flying in from the States. In the end, I opted for the fruit tablets, which apparently is quite fresh, and is used in a lot of taste tripping parties I have read about. It is simply the extract mixed with corn starch.

Ok...so now for the juicy details. Did everything sour turn sweet? Yes! Howeverrrrrr, my problem is that I have a vivid imagination, so when someone tells me there is something out there called "miracle fruit" that transforms everything you taste to whole good sweetness, I had visions of olives tasting like ripe bananas, and pickles tasting like lollipops.

It's the same when someone tells you that a movie was AMAZING, and that it is a MUST SEE. Most of the time, the movie will turn out to be ok because you had such high expectations. That is exactly how it was with me and miracle fruit. I almost wish I had tried it without reading so much about it.

It seems miracle fruit will only make a food taste sweet if it already has sugars in it. It magnifies any sugar in the food, and will also exaggerate any spiciness in the food. For example, I tried a mint leaf, and no part of it tasted sweet at all. However, with tabasco sauce, because there is sugar in it, it magnified the sweet taste at first, and then it was just a hot fiery taste at the end (the type of hot that you find in jerk chicken).

Here is a little chart of some of the foods I tried and what it tasted like:

You may have a completely different experience than I did...everyone interprets it in their own way. Don't get me wrong, miracle fruit was really neat, and the foods did transform into really cool tastes. My only advice is to try it with no expectations, and the more the merrier. The people with you is what's going to make the experience.