I’m sure that some of you will have already heard of miracle fruit and some of you have probably tried it. Myles from Funkin told me about it back in the summer, but it was only recently that I thought about it again and bought some.

Miracle fruit is a berry that looks a lot like an elongated coffee cherry and they’re native to West Africa. It’s a bit of a renegade as it isn’t currently classified by the FSA (Food Standards Agency) and is therefor not considered to be safe or unsafe… sounds tempting so far eh? The reason that this fruit is so special is because of the active protein within it known as miraculin

*cue spooky music*

Miraculin changes the way that your brain perceives taste, ultimately making sour or bitter things appear to be bewilderingly sweet. Lemons taste like lemonade, orange juice tastes like orange cordial, Guinness tastes like coffee and chocolate, vinegar tastes like… err… very sweet vinegar. Here comes the science…

Our tongues have taste buds which sit just below the surface are made up of chemoreceptor cells, which process taste by protruding tiny bristles, or gustatory hairs, through taste pores and into the  huge void that is our gobs. Our tongue is covered in these little beauties and the four main flavours1 tend to get a warmer welcome around certain parts of our palate – sweetness at the front, salt in the middle, acidity along the sides, bitterness at the back.

Normally when we drink lemon juice our acidity and bitter receptors go nuts telling our brains that we’ve eaten something very sharp.

What miracle fruit and miraculin does is to bind to the tongue, temporarily altering the way that our sweetness receptors work. Even though we are eating something sour (like a lemon), our sweetness receptors under the effect of miraculin perceive the acidity to be sweetness. Our gustatory receptor cells tell our brain that they can feel something sweet even though it is sour and low and be behold – lemon juice tastes sweet(er). Of course the acidity and bitterness receptors are still firing too, but because we are perceiving sweetness the acidity in the juice is suppressed.

I have of course donated my body to taste research and undergone a practical experiment using a freeze-dried pack of miracle fruit powder, this mostly involved me running around the kitchen trying loads of different ingredients to see how the were affected. Bizarely, even foodstuffs which are perhaps not sour in the first place are altered somewhat, just because they do have a certain fruitiness or bite to them.

 

Clementine (it’s Christmas)

Not that nice, a bit like when you get one of those over ripe clementines with no freshness to it. Very little punch and a bit boring, a bit like orange cordial.

Marmite

Really weird, somehow makes it more warming, a bit like marmite on toast rather than just out of the jar.

Lemon

Amazing, tastes like old fashioned lemonade in a concentrated form. Still plenty of zing, but with a sweetness to balance.

Lime

Really tasted and more balanced than the lemon juice, really tastes like it’s had a teaspoon of sugar stirred through it!

Grapefruit

I am a huge grapefruit fan anyway, but with miracle fruit this stuff is awesome. Nearly all of the bitterness is suppressed and it tastes almost too sweet.

Cherry Tomatoes

Bland and boring, with the freshness gone they taste really boring and sweet, but in an unnatural sort of way.

Lager

Less bitterness, but ironically (since hops give lager its bitterness) the hop flavour is magnified. Also a touch of honey on the front of the tongue. More estery fruit flavours like bubblegum.

Wine (Rose)

Far too sweet, unbalanced, undrinkable.

Coke

Very sweet. Coke contains citric (or phosphoric) acid to balance the sweetness, once that is suppressed the drink becomes unbearably sweet. Highlights more of the caramel flavours.

And, the one you’ve all been waiting for…

Espresso

A definite lift in sweetness. Bitterness remains and somehow it tastes naturally sweeter. The increase in sweetness does mask some of the acidity though, so the drink is not as balanced or as crisp as you would like it to be. I haven’t tried it in a milk based coffee drink yet, but i’m guessing that there will only be a slight lift in sweetness since a latte has little acidity – though it will be interesting to see how it works with lactic acid.

 

So in summary – very interesting indeed. The way that the flavours are altered is something that intrigues me, bartenders often use sugar as a seasoning because it can magnify certain characteristics of a drink, just like salt and pepper expose flavours in savoury food. Miracle fruit seems to do the same thing for food which is overly sour or bitter to begin with, balancing it as if sugar has been added, but somehow as if it was just that way in the first place. I would advise anyone to give it a go one, but be warned – drinking lots of fresh lemon juice can give you a bit of a stomach ache!

EDIT: Forgot to mention – the effects of miracle fruit last for around 1 hour, so don’t do it before a nice meal out. Also, you can purchase it from Miracle Fruit UK.

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