So I’m sure you’ve all heard of the “miracle berry,” this super-expensive and relatively hard-to-acquire fruit which, when chewed and held on the tongue for a minute or two, does this weird thing to your taste buds so that bitter things taste sweet. People get together and eat them and have what are called, adorably, “flavor-tripping parties,” and which are apparently trendy enough among the young urban hipster (check out that fur coat) foodsnobby elite to have been featured in an NY Times Lifestyles article. Well, we’ve wanted to try these ever since we heard about them, but not quite enough to overcome our cheapness and laziness when it comes to getting on a three-month waiting list to purchase two berries for fifteen bucks, or whatever.
However! ThinkGeek comes to the rescue again, with their “miracle berry pills” – which really do seem to contain nothing but freeze-dried miracle berries. (I was worried that these would be the ephedrine to a real miracle berry’s cocaine, but it doesn’t seem to be so. I’m sure there is indeed some loss of power or longevity of the effect, but if so – not enough for that 3-month waiting list.)
When you read about these berries, it’s kind of impossible to ignore all the drug lingo. Not just that there are “flavor-tripping parties,” but the whole thing. Like, they’re vaguely hard to get ahold of, and there’s an illegalish feel to the procurement of them. There’s a ritual of preparing yourself and your space when you take them. It alters your perceptions of reality. Honestly – and this sounds stupid, I know, but it’s true – when I took them, a combination of this psychosomatic belief that I was taking drugs and my actual excitement to be trying this neat new thing that I’ve wanted to try for a long time both kind of mixed together to make me a little light-headed and butterfly-stomached. In other words…I kind of felt like I was in that first stage after you take drugs and before they kick in, when you’re anticipating the effect so much that you accidentally think that you already are feeling it, you know? (Not like I’ve ever done drugs before, Future Employers Who Have Found My Blog). So if I accidentally slip into the lingo (I kept saying I was “taking” or “doing” the pills, instead of “eating” them), please forgive.
Anyway! As part of our drug-ish preparation, we laid out all of the foods we wanted to try. The main thing the berries do is make bitter or sour things taste sweet, thus the radishes, limes, lemons. It also affects tangy things, thus the cheeses. And it makes things that are already sweet cloying, thus the marshmallows, chocolate, etc. (I was particularly interested in the Nerds, since they are both sweet and really tart, kind of, at the same time.) Also, stout beers are supposed to taste like chocolate, so we got one of those, but we also got an IPA to see what would happen to its bitterness.
The pills were biggish, sort of the shape and size and texture of a Tums. We took one pill, chewed it up, and let it sit in our mouths for a minute. I think I kind of fucked up mine. What you’re supposed to do is chew it up into a paste and let the paste sit all over all the parts of your tongue for a minute or two. I chewed mine up, but wasn’t prepared for its half-yucky taste, and got all spitty, and half-swallowed it too soon, I think. So I suggested to Ian that we take a second pill. (We got 10 tablets in the box that we bought, and one dose is 1/2 a tablet. So we were already at a double dose [which isn't wacky or anything - the site suggests taking a double dose for a "more intense experience"], so with two pills we were at a quad dose. But we had tons of pills, and frankly, I don’t imagine we’re going to want to do this terribly often. It’s not like we were worried about running out.) The second pill I didn’t chew at all, just moved around over the surface of my tongue until it slowly dissolved. Ian did this for both of his pills. (I know this is a slightly disgusting amount of detail, but there is a reason I mention it – mine wore off way sooner than Ian’s did, and I suspect this was why.)
So! Super-scientific results:
Lemon –
The first thing we tried was the lemon. It’s what everybody mentions as being the coolest thing, and it’s true – it was. It tasted exactly like a lemon drop. It was the most delicious lemon candy I’ve ever had. But the cool thing was that if you bit hard into the lemon, sometimes you wouldn’t even really get lemon flavor at all – just this giant rush of sugar, as though if you were eating the lemon without the miracle fruit you would have only gotten a rush of sour and this was just the way your mouth was translating it. Ian said he didn’t even get that clenching at the back of his jaw like you get when you eat sour stuff. I got just a tiny twinge of it.
Lime –
The lime had the same effect as the lemon, but wasn’t as super-duper delicious. Tasted like a limeade.
Radishes -
I was really excited about the radishes for some reason, but they were a bit boring. They tasted like radishes, but less bitter. No big whoop.
Parsley and Arugula -
Tasted like parsley/arugula, but less so. The flavor itself was just dialed way down. This was an interesting effect that we hadn’t anticipated that happened to a few different things. (Most notably the cheap grated bagged cheddar cheese.)
Red wine -
This shit tasted EXACTLY LIKE MANISCHEWITZ!!! I had bought relatively crappy wine for this experiement, so it was very tannin-y and very bitter. I had expected that it would taste like grape jucie. NOT SO! If you’ve never tasted Manischewitz, it’s basically just super-sweet super-crappy wine, but I really have to stress HOW MUCH this tasted like it. It was nuts. (Also, as Ian informed me, apparently everyone says this, so it’s not a novel thought.)
Raspberry –
Sweet and tasty. No big whoop, until I ate one again after the effect had worn off and realized that these were actually pretty tart berries. We should have tried all of the food first, but Ian claimed he didn’t need to, because he knew what cheese tastes like, and I forgot to press the issue.
Canned pineapple -
We buy pineapple in juice. This tasted like pineapple in syrup. Now you understand how mind-altering this stuff is!
Carrot –
Sweet, yummy, not much real change.
Shredded bagged cheddar cheese –
THIS CRAP WAS EFFIN AWFUL. This was far and away my least favorite flavor of the night, and one of the biggest changes. Er, for me, anyway. Ian wasn’t quite as disgusted as I was.
I was very disgusted.
The thing was, the flavor of this cheese was just gone. There was nothing there, so all that was left was the texture, which was that of dry, dusty pre-grated bagged cheese. Maybe, in fact, what I was having was a reaction not to the actual fact of the flavor I was experiencing, but a more visceral reaction to the wrongness of eating something that tasted of nothing when I knew that it should taste like cheese. Anyway – hated this.
Parmesan reggiano –
Not as awful, but definitely less flavorful. “A waste of a good regiano,” was all Ian had to say, and I pretty much agree. The one really weird thing that was true for all of the food we tried but which was most disconcerting in this particular case was that everything still smelled the way it should. So it was weird that it didn’t taste the way it smelled.
Blue cheese –
All I have down in my notes for this one is a big drawing of a sad face.
Stone Imperial Russian Stout –
Super yummo! I don’t usually like stouts that much (Ian does) but I loved this one. Ian said it tasted like a chocolate egg cream, and that’s exactly true. It was sweet and dark and chocolatey and good.
Southern Tier UnEarthly IPA –
IPAs, unlike stouts, are something that I really like and Ian usually doesn’t so much. But with the miracle berries, we agreed – just gross. IPAs are super-bitter, right? And all the bitterness turned to sweetness. Somehow in the stout it worked, but in the IPA it was just plain yucky. Some things shouldn’t be sweetened, and this was one of them.
I think the difference between why the stout was so good and why the IPA was so bad has to do with the flavors in those two beers other than their bitterness. Both beers are bitter. But, in addition to being bitter, stouts taste smoky and chocolatey and have a creamy texture. IPAs, in addition to their bitterness, taste sharp and zingy and green and fresh. “Smoky and chocolatey and creamy” goes well with the sweet which replaced the bitter. “sharp and zingy and green and fresh” does not go well with sweet.
Marshmallow, chocolate –
Same as usual. Not too cloying or anything.
Nerds –
Ian said these were boring. They were, I guess. You know how usually when you eat Nerds, there’s a sweet phase and then there’s a tart phase? Meh. Not anymore.
Horseradish –
Sweet at first, then with a hot zing for a finish. Yummy in a non-radical sort of way. This was the most useful change of the night, I think. If I could buy horseradish that always just tasted like this, I would.
Mustard –
Weird! Sweet!
Honey –
We tried the super-fancy honey we bought in Paris, which usually has these really great complex layers of flavor: sharp zings and fruity sweetnesses. It tastes very much like champagne, usually. With the miracle berries it was just sweet and flat – no zings, no layers, no complexity at all.
Balsamic vinegar –
Basically tasted like soda. Ian drank too much of this, I suspect. There’s a half-amusing warning on the ThinkGeek website that says that even though it tastes like you’re eating candy, you really are eating acids, so, you know, don’t eat so many lemons that you burn your tongue or get a stomachache or whatever. Well…Ian kept going back for seconds on spoonfuls of balsamic.
Wasabi and Siracha –
I tried the wasabi, Ian tried the Siracha. Both had the same general effect: a tiny split-second of really interesting wasabi- or Siracha-flavored sweetness, followed by a huge walloping punch of heat that obliterates any and all flavors, just like eating those things plain usually would.
Soy sauce –
Weird. Like, disconcerting. Not necessarily sweeter than usual, but noticeably less flavorful. Tasted like really cheap soy sauce, maybe.
Apple cider vinegar –
Tasted like kind of crappy apple juice. Ian liked this one way better than I did (at this point my effect was starting to wear off, but his was still going strong) and, again, I think he went back and hit the bottle a few too many times. (We both actually ended up with slight sickish stomachaches after this experiment. Perhaps therefore not our most successful foodblog ever.)
Digby –
Fur.
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