Miracle Fruit

Now this is a cool little thing - a fruit that neutralises all sour flavours, leaving you with the sweet remainder.

So-called Miracle Fruit has been around for a while:

Miracle Fruit (Sideroxylon dulcificum) was documented by an explorer named Des Marchais during an 1725 excursion to West Africa, according to Sina Najafi’s interview with Adam Leith Gollner, which can be found in the current issue of Cabinet. Marchais noticed that local tribes picked the berry off shrubs and chewed it before meals. From there, the amazing Miracle Fruit was seemingly lost in the shuffle of colonialism, and was later tested by the U.S. Army and several pharmaceutical giants before being rejected suddenly by the FDA in 1974, under mysterious, X-Files type circumstances (a “high speed car chase;” “men in sunglasses”). Gollner is working on a book examining the “fruit underworld,” including the sad odyssey of the Miracle Fruit, which is legal in many other countries. In Japan, some Weight Watchers-style meals revolve around it, and miraculin can be purchased in tablet form.

They seem to be making appearances at "fruit parties" all over the country...

The miracle fruit party was last night. I arrived to find a group of twenty-five or so curious people, a spread of citrus items, and, wrapped up in a Ziploc bag in the refrigerator, a bunch of little red fruits: the understated star of the show, miracle fruit.

They're bright red, about the size of an olive, odorless, and just a little bit soft. The center is mostly pit. To get the most of them, David explained that we should chew the pulpy part for about a minute and coat as much of our mouth as possible with it. Then we'd be free to spit or swallow and experience the magic of miraculin.

But what happens when you eat them???

Limes tasted like lime candy, lemons like lemonade, and meyer lemons and red grapefruit were some of the most tasty things I've ever eaten in my life. On the other hand, pineapples and kiwi were cloying, coffee was mostly unchanged, and wine was just plain disgusting.

I also got several different stouts and bitter beers. Guinness was good with it, but the real stars were the more serious stouts. Samuel Smith's Oatmeal Stout (my favorite beer, maybe?) was heavenly, and Brooklyn Brewery's Black Chocolate Stout (a good, but normally very bitter beer) was amazingly smooth and creamy. They both seemed to have more body, and more of a flavorful sweetness than stout normally has. The lovely bitter notes, again, were not entirely masked, so unlike what the miracle fruit did to wine, stout was still stout. It maintained all of its characteristics, the miracle fruit merely altered the dynamics of the characteristics, emphasizing the chocolatey, earthy, malty, and fermenty flavors, while smoothing out the bitterness. Many people in attendance described the chocolate stout as tasting "just like ice cream."

Sign me up, man, sounds intriguing.

Via BoingBoing