I threw a Miracle Fruit tasting party, and it was a success of flavor!
I bought 50 frozen berries and kept them in my freezer until the party. The berries come with instructions on how to best masticate for flavor-tripping optimization – it takes about 2 minutes in your mouth to do a good job of recalibrating your taste buds. The effects last a good 30 minutes, tapering off completely by an hour. Apparently it’s easier to find the processed tablets of the fruit extract, and the couple people who had done that before said that the effects were pretty close to identical.
What worked really well:
- Limes – This is really the best place to start. There’s a reason every miracle fruit site lists limes first.
- Lemons – A little sourness still comes through (more than limes), but still fantastic.
- Grapefruit – Grapefruit may be the only normal-ish food that I loathe, but on miracle fruit, it tastes fantastic!
- Lemon Juice – Tastes like lemonade.
- Bloody Mary mix – Unfortunately I forgot to taste this myself, but everyone raved about it.
- Hoppy/Bitter Beer – I bought Stone Ruination IPA and this was the clear winner of the 3 beers we had. Normally I can’t stand even tame IPAs because of the bitterness, but the miracle fruit really toned down the bitterness while leaving the floral characteristics of the hops.
- Vinegar – Drinking balsamic vinegar raw was really fun and delicious!
- Tabasco – Still spicy, but delicious by itself now.
- Endives – My favorite of the vegetables we tried. The bitterness is gone and it makes a great snack.
- Mustard – This one surprised me the most. I hadn’t read much about it, but eating raw mustard was fabulous. It tasted like the fanciest sweet mustard I’ve ever had.
- Wine – Some people disagreed with me, but I loved how the berries made a Malbec wine taste like a madeira or port dessert wine.
- Umeboshi – Pickled plum paste. The sourness still came through, but it was rendered much more palatable and was fun to eat raw.
- Update 11/2011: Sour cream – I went to a friend’s Miracle Fruit party recently and this was the one thing that really surprised me. Sour cream is amazing!
Mixed reaction items:
- Sour beer - I got Drie Fonteinen Oude Gueuze which is normally nearly excruciatingly sour. It was rendered very sweet, much like a Faro, but I happen to prefer it in its sour form, and I don’t think I heard anyone say they significantly preferred the sweetened form.
- Normal beer – We drank some homebrewed beer, and it was just a little sweeter, but not in an overly malty way, which I sort of liked, but other folks’ reactions were mixed.
- Coffee – Coffee is certainly less bitter, but it tastes somewhat like it has a strange sweetener in it. Like stevia, but in a very different way.
- Blue cheese – Mildly affected, but nothing terribly impressive.
- Dark chocolate – We tried fancy 85%, 99%, and 100% cacao. The berries only cut a small amount of the bitterness – the 100% was still unpalatable, and the 85% and 99% weren’t much different either.
- Worcestershire sauce – Mildly affected, but not as fun to drink as tabasco and vinegar.
- Dill pickles – They tasted kind of like bread and butter pickles, which some people liked and some didn’t.
Not affected:
- Radicchio – Still way too bitter to eat raw.
- Brussels sprouts – We only ate them raw, but still unappetizing.
- Sweet fruits – We tried plums, watermelons, mango, and pineapple, but I don’t think any of them tasted significantly different since they were already sweet.
- Celery
- Peanut butter
- Honey
- Boiled peanuts
- Cassava melon
All-in-all, this was a very worthwhile adventure in flavor-land, and I highly recommend it.