Miraculin is a protein that makes sour things taste like sugar

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I don’t know about the current state of affairs, but when I first read about miracle berries, the reason they weren’t used more often was because the plant was difficult to cultivate, and miraculin degraded very quickly, necessitating a plant on hand for culinary uses.
Something about miraculin not holding up under refrigeration any better than at room temperature…

I’m probably wrong about that.

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Turns out the only way to make the protein food-stable was to bind it with lard.

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I’m skeptical of the claim that it will only last “as long as the food in your mouth.” Not to mention it will easily affect eating and/or drinking two separate things at once. Miraculin cakes consumed with milk? Eugh.

Just drink it with milk that’s gone sour. :slight_smile:

I don’t really think miraculin, however practical they can make it, could ever totally replace sugar. A lot of the places sugar is used in cooking aren’t necessarily for the sweet taste alone. It does all sorts of fun chemical stuff that artificial sweeteners don’t do, and I’m reasonably sure miraculin as a protein would be able to do. You can use it to preserve fruit. Help bread retain moisture. Boil it with different concentrations of water, for different times, to create innumerable different textures. It increases the effect of pectin in jam making. And a ton of other things. So sure it might have a place in low cal processed foods, and you can probably do all sorts of interesting stuff with shifting the flavors of various unexpected ingredients. But can I brulee it? Pull it into taffy? Will it keep sorbets and ice creams from getting icy and hard. That’s the big problem with most artificial sweeteners. However good or bad they taste they don’t behave like sugar chemically. So now your stuck using a menagerie of different single use ingredients to get the other properties while x compound handles sweetness.

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