News and views | What miracle berries do to your palate

News and views

What miracle berries do to your palate

It was surreal. The small room was filled with around thirty people – some with their faces painted white – walking around in disposable white boiler suits. We looked like workmen from outer space. Moreover, we’d been given miniature test-tubes of different flavoured liquids to add to our champagne to make instant, DIY cocktails – which made our glasses sparkle with exotic jewel colours of electric blue, turquoise and fuchsia. Though normally adventurous in matters related to food and drink, I chose to keep my champagne natural. After all, I was going to put my tastebuds through enough for one evening.

This was UK’s first known public flavour tripping party, organised by self-styled ‘jellymongers’ Bompas and Parr an innovative company that organises culinary events that, according to co-founder Sam Bompas, “exist in the space between food and architecture”. ‘Flavour tripping’ is a term that is used to describe the changes that occur to one’s palate after eating ‘miracle berries’ (synsepalum dulcificum), a fruit native to Ghana. The fruit makes sour foods, in particular, taste sweet; and other distinctively flavoured foods taste fundamentally altered. Hence the boiler suits: a jokey warning to ‘enter at your peril’. Already huge in the US, flavour tripping parties are now set to take off in the UK.

The miracle berries are rarely eaten fresh – except in West Africa, where they’re eaten straight from the bush in order to make mundane, everyday items like maize porridge taste more palatable. Most berries available in the West are freeze-dried, or made into potent purple-pink pills, each of which contains the extract of three berries. We were handed a pill each, and asked to roll it slowly around our tongue for five minutes. The pill must cover every surface of the tongue in order to ensure an effective flavour trip. It tasted pleasantly tangy, rather like a mild cranberry.

Then we were led down what felt like a rabbit hole to a basement room where the lights had been dimmed, and the thump-thump-thump of trance-like music played in the background. In the centre of the room was a table piled with fruits and vegetables, and at the back a shelf laden with popular branded condiments and drinks. Normally I would eat and drink with all my senses alert, but as the visual impact was lost in the darkness and my palate was confused, I began to feel disorientated.

Lemons were the most successful: they tasted intensely of sweet oranges dipped in honey, caramel, toffee, and even chocolate. Other fruits, like lime, pineapple, pink grapefruit and kiwi simply tasted sweeter. Cheese was a different matter. Goat’s cheese had lost its sharpness and was bland and chalky; but blue cheese had retained its relentless earthy savouriness. We hadn’t tasted the cheeses before the flavour trip so, other than memory, we didn’t have immediate reference points for comparison.

Many strong foods tasted neutralised, as though they’d been stripped of their identity and distinctiveness. Gherkins were a sweet-natured shadow of their former sharp, tangy, angry selves; and brussels sprouts tasted pleasantly sweet, having lost their metallic edge. Tabasco sauce was like sweet, fiery chilli jam; but tomato ketchup, mustard, and balsamic vinegar were underwhelming. Malt vinegar tasted like cheap plonk; and piccalilli tasted bizarrely of asafoetida.

The textures, too, were striking: they seemed heightened. I could feel the hard rind on the limes and the goat’s cheese; and was aware of every fibre in sticks of rhubarb. Everything felt slightly meatier and chunkier on the tongue.

As for drinks, bitter ale had lost its insistent taste; and champagne and wine tasted as though they had been mixed with cough medicine. However, by the time I tried the drinks – including still mineral water, which tasted normal – the effects of the flavour trip were beginning to wear off. They typically last between half hour to two hours, but they are at their strongest during the first twenty minutes.

Dave Hart, who was present from the Institute of Food Research in Norwich, told me that miracle berries are currently being researched for use for diabetics, as well as patients undergoing chemotherapy whose tastebuds have been affected by their treatment. In Japan, the pills have been used as a slimming aid for around a decade. In the UK, they are used for teaching children the difference between taste and flavour.

I don’t know how miracle berries will influence the culinary world in the long term, I can see why chefs such as Heston Blumenthal would be reluctant to use the berries on their menus. Once you’ve eaten a berry, all subsequent foods would taste sweet, so it would be like eating in a dessert-only restaurant. But I would certainly recommend flavour tripping as a unique, one-off experience. It would be interesting to explore how other items, such as mushrooms, spices, eggs and different types of wines were affected; and flavour tripping with a blindfold could elevate the experience to another dimension altogether.

For details of forthcoming flavour tripping parties in UK, contact Bompas & Parr at info@jellymongers.co.uk. Miracle berry tablets are widely available online from retailers such as Miracleberry and Firebox

Sejal Sukhadwala is a food writer and restaurant reviewer who contributes to a number of UK national newspapers and food publications including The Guardian, The Daily Telegraph, The Times, The Independent and Time Out. She is food editor of Ryanair magazine and has a number of her own on-line projects lined up for 2009

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Comments: 1 (Add)

Miracle Berry on July 21 2016 at 16:50

Thank you Fiona for a brilliant article. Miracle Berry tablets are still available at Miracleberry.co.uk at only £12.99

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