Experimenting with Miracle Berry Tablets

My buddy told me that he ordered some Miracle Berry tablets from Amazon and he wanted to test them out.

“Miracle berry tablets?”, I asked. “What the heck are those?”

Well, according to the Wikipedia, the real name of “miracle berry” is Synsepalum dulcificum:

Synsepalum dulcificum is a plant in the Sapotaceae family, native to tropical Africa. It is known for its berry that, when eaten, causes sour foods (such as lemons and limes) subsequently consumed to taste sweet. This effect is due to miraculin. Common names for this species and its berry include miracle fruit, miracle berry, miraculous berry, sweet berry, and in West Africa, where the species originates, agbayun (in Yoruba), taami, asaa, and ledidi.

The berry itself has a low sugar content and a mildly sweet tang. It contains a glycoprotein molecule, with some trailing carbohydrate chains, called miraculin. When the fleshy part of the fruit is eaten, this molecule binds to the tongue’s taste buds, causing sour foods to taste sweet. At neutral pH, miraculin binds and blocks the receptors, but at low pH (resulting from ingestion of sour foods) miraculin binds proteins and becomes able to activate the sweet receptors, resulting in the perception of sweet taste. This effect lasts until the protein is washed away by saliva (up to about 30 minutes).

“Causing sour foods to taste sweet? That’s crazy.”

“Well, the app says that the delivery will be completed at 3PM. So let’s go to the grocery store.”

Here’s what we got:

Lemons, limes, tangerines, strawberries, tomatoes, pickles, Sour Patch Kids…

Pineapple, hot sauce, and Guinness.

And then, around 2PM, the tablets arrived. Here’s what the packaging looks like:

And here’s what’s inside:

And here’s the tablet:

So, first things first, we sampled the various fruits we had picked up without taking the tablet first. Pretty good. Pineapple was sweet, Sour Patch Kids are Sour Patch Kids, and I bit into a wedge of lime and got the old Arrested Development meme: “I don’t know what I expected.” It tasted exactly like biting into a lime. I winced and made the sour face and said “pretty lime-y”.

So we opened up the packet and looked at the tablets. “Is this illegal?”, we joked. “It feels like we’re doing something illegal.”

We popped a tablet in our mouth and sucked on it. It didn’t taste like anything at all at first. Maybe it was a small bit fruity but also somewhat medicine-y? Like it was a cough drop, almost. Maybe like it was fruit candy made by a hippie lady who explained that her fruit candy was so much better for you than the fruit candy you buy at the store. It took about 5 minutes to dissolve and, towards the end, we were joking about how we just wanted to bite into it. Maybe smash future tablets with a hammer and eat them like Pixie Stix.

So we finished it up and said… let’s do it.

I bit into a lime wedge again.

HOLY CRAP IT WAS LIKE EATING LIME CANDY. IT WAS ABSOLUTELY WEIRD.

Bit into a lemon wedge, it was like eating lemon candy. Ate a slice of tangerine and felt the acid in my mouth but could not taste the slightest bit of tang. I coughed as the acid was doing its thing and said “it’s so weird to feel like I’m eating citrus but to taste like I’m eating pure sugar.”

Pickles were disappointing. Do you like salt? All I could taste was the salt.

Bit into a tomato and my eyes widened. “Tomatoes *ARE* a fruit!”, I said in surprise. I mean, I know that, technically, they’re fruits but you put tomatoes in a vegetable salad and you don’t put them in fruit salad.

The strawberry and pineapple? These were the sweetest fruits I’d ever tasted. The pineapple tasted like I was eating it next to the plantation in Hawaii and the strawberries tasted like I had found a strawberry bush in the woods.

We squoze a half lemon into a glass of water and a half lime into a different glass of water. He got the lime, I got the lemon and my glass tasted like Newman’s Own Lemonade. “Wow”, we said. “Wow.”

I wanted to try the Sour Patch Kids next and they tasted sweet, I guess, and after about three seconds, they tasted like we were eating wax candy. Like those wax bottles candies right before you spit the wax out.

We then sipped on some Guinness and tasted little more than chocolate and coffee and it tasted good… but weird. It wasn’t mocha, really. It tasted like someone put chocolate and coffee into a drink but also made sure that it was *NOT* mocha.

We finished up with the Cholula hot sauce sprinkled on some soft tortillas and it was a delightful sweet heat. I wouldn’t mind a hot sauce that tasted like that, now that I think about it.

And, finally, we cleansed our palettes with some spearmint gum and that was *WEIRD* as well. Like there was a hole in the flavor profile, replaced by nothing.

And, after a half hour or so, our taste buds came back to normal.

Seriously, this is something that you can do for a party with your friends. Make an evening of it.

I, personally, am never inclined to do it again. But it was fun as heck to do it once.