Miracle Berries

I recently jumped on the miracle berries bandwagon. It was an interesting experience.

For those of you who don't know, and those too lazy to read the Wikipedia page, miracle berries are a type of fruit that trick your taste-buds into tasting things that are usually sour or bitter as sweet.

I first heard about them a few months ago, somewhere on the internet, but it wasn't until ThinkGeek started selling them that I seriously considered buying some. So I sauntered over to eBay (shipping from ThinkGeek's warehouses to my house is pretty damn pricey) and bought some off some guy in Scotland.

They arrived on Tuesday. I got a pack of 10 tablets, which is allegedly 20 doses, but I'm not convinced of this fact. I called up my friend Tinsley and we went to Tesco to buy some supplies.

We got lemons, limes, kiwis, grapefruit, tomatoes, goat's cheese, Guinness an mustard. Which, I'm sure you'll agree, is an odd combination.

After we had each taken half a tablet, we tested it out by biting into some lemons and soon discovered that the tablets do exactly what it says on the box. The lemons still tasted of lemons, except that all the sourness had been replaced by sweetness of the same magnitude. The result was that the lemons tasted like lemons that had been marinating in sugar syrup for a week. It was an interesting novelty, but a bit too sweet for my taste.

Next we tried limes. They tasted much better, and the sweetness wasn't too overpowering. My favourite items were the kiwis, which had an excpetionally smooth flavour to them while under the effects of the berry.

We washed all this down with Guinness. According to this site, the berries cause Guinness to taste like chocolate milkshake, although I didn't find it to be the case. It certainly didn't taste like Guinness, but there was nothing chocolatey about it. Perhaps the reason is that I accidentally bought regular canned Guinness, as opposed to the draught variety. I know the draught stuff is creamier and tastes a bit different. I'll have to make sure I get the right stuff next time...

The tomatoes tasted particularly like tomatoes, except that they weren't as sharp. As I don't like tomatoes, I was not happy with this turn of events! Goat's cheese is supposed to taste like icing, but to me it just tasted like very mild cheese. I didn't try the mustard, as I was apprehensive that taking a spoonful of mustard would be a mistake, considering that the tomato taste wasn't significantly altered. Having said that, I have read reports of the taste of vinegar and tobasco sauce being completely transformed. These will be items for future experimentation.

The effects of the tablets seemed to be wearing off after about 20 minutes, which was less than the 30-60 minutes we had expected, and we still had a lot of fruit left, so we took another half-tablet each, peeled all the fruit and blended it into smoothies. These turned out to be exceptionally sweet (probably from all the lemon juice) and I was unable to finish mine.

All in all, it was an interesting experience, and I'm looking forward to trying out other things in the future (I have 8 tablets left). It feels pretty weird to be eating lemons like they were oranges, but I think I would have to disagree with a lot of the hype. The berries don't seem to fundamentally change the flavour of the food being tasted, just to make it a lot sweeter. I could probably achieve the same effect by dipping the lemons in sugar, but with the berries I get to save on the dentist bill.