Taste: Surprising Stories and Science About Why Food Tastes Good (38 page)

I make the world’s best Brussels sprouts. I blanch them lightly, cut them in half, and then sear them, flat side down, in bacon fat on the highest setting my gas-burning range can achieve. I toss them with a spritz of seasoned rice vinegar, crisp cubes of bacon, a spritz of fish sauce, and a suspicion of sea salt. Each bite is a balanced combination of bitter, sweet, sour, salt, and umami, but Roger refuses to eat them. In his sensory world, Brussels sprouts are simply too bitter, and no amount of culinary makeup hides that.

People who taste PROP (the bitter marker compound) as bitter are likely to perceive vegetables such as Brussels sprouts and kale as bitter, too, and thus are less likely to eat them.

If you live with a bitter rejecter, I hope this chapter endows you with taste empathy. This person is not trying to make your life as the family cook more difficult, but is probably just a HyperTaster with genetic intolerances for specific bitter tastes. But the fact that some members of your family won’t eat bitter doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try to get them to eat more vegetables. Vegetables
are clearly good for us and there are some easy ways to tame bitterness, some of which you instinctively already know.

The easiest way to balance the taste of bitter foods is to add counterpoint tastes, such as sweet, sour, and salt. To Brussels sprouts, add salt and, yes, even sugar. Don’t be ashamed to add anything sweet, such as honey, maple syrup, agave, or juice to a dish that’s out of balance for your dearest bitter rejecters. You can also enjoy the same bitterness-balancing effects of sweetness without the calories. Aspartame (Nutrasweet, Equal) and sucralose (Splenda) both do the job effectively. If adding sugar to vegetables sounds like cheating, you’ll quickly get over it when you learn that a study showing that “cheating” by adding as little as 5 percent sugar not only resulted in higher liking scores for the sweetened cauliflower and broccoli, but these same test subjects liked
unsweetened
cauliflower and broccoli better from that point forward. Think of sugar as training wheels for the appreciation of bitter vegetables, not as cheating.

Another way to increase the sweetness of a food is to slowly caramelize it in a bit of oil in the oven or on the stovetop. Even sulfury, bitter cauliflower can become crave-ably sweet in the oven.

Simply cooking vegetables reduces their bitterness. Some of the volatile aromas will flash off when you steam, boil, roast, or otherwise cook a vegetable such as broccoli. The sulfurous smell that may stink up your kitchen means that you’ve liberated the aroma from the cells of the vegetable into the air. While unpleasant smells, like sulfur, don’t contribute a bitter taste, they do exacerbate it, so minimizing icky smells through cooking results in a sweeter, less bitter overall flavor.

I like to add salt and sugar in the form of seasoned rice vinegar (rice vinegar plus sugar plus salt), which also adds sourness. With a few dashes, you can easily add three Basic Taste counterpoints. Remember that salt suppresses bitterness, but it also releases other more desirable flavors from suppression. So even if all you add is a topical shake of salt, you’ll be helping tame the bitterness in more than one way.

The chef’s golden rule is taste, taste, taste. If you taste your broccoli raw, and then taste it again after you blanch it, you’ll get a sense for how blanching affects the bitterness. If you stir-fry it in a wok, taste it after a minute. The bitterness will be likely to have changed again. Add soy sauce (salt and umami) and sugar (sweet), then taste it. Finally, adjust it with acid—maybe a squeeze of lemon or a dash of vinegar—and taste it again. The more you do this, the better you’ll start to understand what works best to balance the flavors of your food.

Mary Tagliaferri, president and chief medical officer of a start-up biotech company called Bionovo, knew that the bitter taste of her company’s herbal hot flash remedy might sabotage its chance at success. Dr. Tagliaferri has a background in traditional Chinese medicine in addition to a degree from the prestigious medical school at the University of California, San Francisco. Her company’s goal is to bring together the best of both Eastern and Western medicine. In 2010 and 2011, Bionovo was putting its herbal remedy through the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s process for drug approval, something truly novel. If the patient trials were successful, Bionovo could market Menerba, its proprietary blend of herbs, as a pharmaceutical, one that would require a prescription.

Phase 1 of Menerba’s FDA drug trials proved that a low dose was safe. For Menerba’s Phase 2 testing the dosage was increased, but was too voluminous to deliver in a pill or capsule, so they decided to create a powdered beverage mix like Theraflu. After months of working unsuccessfully with a supplier to develop a drink that would mask the bitter taste of Menerba, Bionovo called us at Mattson.

Our assignment was to develop a dry beverage mix that the patient would add to water and drink twice a day. When Dr. Tagliaferri and her colleagues brought their samples to us, I didn’t know what to expect. Most of the functional foods we develop aim to deliver delicious taste first, with health benefit a distant second. Menerba was an entirely new thing for us. Women who were desperate enough to seek out medical treatment for hot flashes were going to be less concerned with the taste of their medicine than someone buying a beverage at the local convenience store.

Nonetheless, I was unprepared for the taste of Menerba. In fifteen years of developing new food and beverage products, I had never tasted anything quite so alarming. Menerba hit the palate, immediately, with an acrid, burnt aroma—a result of how the herbs were processed and refined. This burnt note then led into
a whole-mouth bitter taste. The finish, the taste that remains in your mouth after you swallow, held the lingering bitterness of the functional ingredients and an almost moldy, earthy flavor. It was wholly unpleasant.

We strategized on what flavor to develop. Dr. Tagliaferri wanted a lemon or orange flavor because both are widely appealing, but we knew that citrus would be extremely difficult because consumers aren’t expecting bitterness from lemon or orange drinks. We first considered a spicy chai tea, since tea is inherently bitter and the spices would mask some of the unpleasant aromas, but chai isn’t exactly a mainstream flavor, so we abandoned it after one round of formulation. We then settled on a fruit flavor that would be acceptable with a bit of background bitterness: cranberry. It was the perfect choice because consumers would expect a cranberry beverage to have a bit of an edge. We had also noticed during the development of the chai tea that versions of the drink with vanilla were rounder, less bitter. So we tried a very low, undetectable level of vanilla in the drink. It was astonishing: the vanilla helped mask the bitterness of Menerba. In addition, we added just a touch of bitter-suppressing salt—at a threshold level that no one could detect as salty—and the beverage came into focus. Finally, we added a spoonful of sugar to help the medicine go down.

I have since used vanilla as a secret weapon to make just about anything taste better. I’m convinced that the vanilla latte is the most popular coffeehouse drink because vanilla masks the bitter flavor of coffee in a way that hazelnut, caramel, and chocolate just don’t do as well. It’s also why chocolate cake recipes call for vanilla, and why many chocolatiers add a low level of vanilla to their confections. You need to use only a tiny amount of vanilla to take advantage of its bitter-masking effects. Interestingly, vanilla is the only flavor that doesn’t seem to have an upper limit for tolerability. At high levels, where most other flavors have already gone from good to better to way too intense, vanilla doesn’t stop savoring delicious.

If you scrape the inside surface of your cheek for a DNA sample, Monell scientist Danielle Reed could test it and tell you whether you will find the chemical PTC bitter or not. Unfortunately this test doesn’t determine whether you find other things like tea, spinach, or cocoa bitter, or what type of food choices you’ll
make. But we may soon understand more about how our genes determine our reaction to bitter tastes. Reed can foresee a future when foods are developed to appeal to people with certain genes. Instead of marketing their chocolate as 41%, 62%, or 82% cacao, companies like Scharffen Berger will simply indicate which genotypes their Nibby Dark Chocolate bar will appeal to, based on the degree of bitterness each can handle.

I prefer to think of a future where consumers will relish the thought of eating something that assaults their taste buds, which doesn’t require genetic testing or avoiding certain foods. It simply requires a change of perspective in which we consider bitter to be an indispensable tuning knob for balancing flavor. When you scrunch up your face at bitterness, it’s likely that the bitterness is out of balance. So if you’re eating a plate of Brussels sprouts and you just can’t get past the taste, add counterpoints to bring it into balance. Sprinkle on a bit of sugar. Add a dash of salt. Spritz on a bit of lemon or vinegar. Or better yet, toss the sprouts with other vegetables such as sweet potatoes, carrots, or caramelized onions. The next time you make them, use fewer carrots and more sprouts. Eventually you’ll find yourself craving a bowlful of them—alone—specifically for the energizing, stimulating taste challenge that bitter provides.

SERVES 5 TO 6

YOU WILL NEED

About 1½ to 2 pounds fresh Brussels sprouts, in season (this provides the bitter)