It used to taste like soap to me, but I ate it anyway in homemade Salsa and now I love it. It grew on me, I guess.
I don’t like the way that cilantro tastes OR smells, and if I happen to eat something that has cilantro in it, I can tell right away even if there isn’t very much. To me it’s sort of like garlic in this respect, it becomes an overriding flavor and I can hardly taste the rest of the dish.
Cilantro doesn’t taste like soap to me. I had never thought to describe the taste that way until I heard several people mention it.
I can taste the soapy notes, but only very faintly, and it oddly seems to harmonize in most things. So I’m cool with it.
Supertasting is just an overall hyper-sensitivity. There are also specific sensitivities which are either genetically coded or not. The author falls in between, sensing the bad scent, but not the good one. I note the author doesn’t say whether the other two sense the soap flavor. It’d be nice to know whether they sensed both, or only the good one. I’d also like to know whether the author likes coriander.
Either way, soap. Cilantro is soap. I absoutely love coriander, which comes from the seeds. I’ve also had the roots, which I liked. The leaves are horrid.
With cilantro its either fresh or dried leaves. Dried leaves like you would get from a bottle are strictly vile. Find a fresh bunch of leaves in the produce aisle and fling a few fresh chopped leaves in a pot of pinto beans and it is glorious! But be carefull. it can be overwhelming.
Fresh seems to be the deal maker for me.
I love LOVE LOVE coriander (cilantro is a weird furren word that means nothing to me). Can’t get enough of it. It’s one of the reasons I go gaga for curry.
I LOVE fresh cilantro; until I started hanging around here, I couldn’t imagine anyone having anything negative to say about it. I wonder if we (lovers vs. haters) are wired differently.
mmm
The tiniest little bit ruins everything, like a poop in the pool.
Ditto, soapy taste but I like it anyway, we get through a load of it.
This exactly. I voted ‘like the smell, not the taste’ but I don’t really remember every smelling it. The taste is unbelievably awful though. For most foodstuffs I dislike, I can at least understand that there are things about them that other people like. For coriander/cliantro, it seems to me that it is essentially not an edible foodstuff - I have a sneaky suspicion that when people say they like it, they’re playing an elaborate joke on me. I’ve never tasted the soapyness, it tastes like ashtray sweepings to me, if anything.
It’s the same plant, but the flavor is completely different. Coriander is the seeds, but cilantro is the leaves.
I looked up a home test for supertasting, but I couldn’t find one. But the description is different than I thought. I thought it just meant you had better than average ability to distinguish tastes, which I believe I do. But if it’s just a specific taste, I may not.
I do know that my sister is extremely sensitive to bitter tasting things, and she still loves cilantro.
I love it.
Yep. Voted ‘other’ for the same reasons.
OK, now I know what it is (yeah, I should have read further through the thread), I say I like the smell and the taste but have no idea if I’m a supertaster.
They’re confounding the two issues. The hatred doesn’t arrive from being a supertaster. Non-supertasters often dislike (or more accurately, take no joy in consuming), things with subtle flavors. (They tend to like foods based more on youthful associations and texture.)
It could be that the people who dislike something like cilantro so much are perceiving only one part of its cumulative sensory effect, because they are in fact non-supertasters.
I agree completely.
I can’t stand even being in the same room in which it’s cut because the smell is so noxious. It smells and tastes like a rotting poisonous plant. If I were a cave-woman gathering herbs in the forest and discovered a cilantro patch, everything about it would scream TOXIC DO NOT EAT and I would avoid it from then on.
I have no idea if I’m a supertaster or not. I don’t have a sharp sense of smell, so by association, I assume I don’t have a sharp sense of taste. Cilantro supercedes that.
Only for Americans. In international english, coriander is the whole plant, including the leaves. Cilantro means nothing to non-American english speakers.
I wish folks would say where they are from when they post stuff like that. 
I discovered my hatred for cilantro when I had dinner at a girlfriend’s mother’s house. Apparently I had never had it before, and when we were served salad I sat there wondering if the salad had been made with rotten greens. I forced down what I could in order to be polite, but just barely.
Later I carefully approached the subject with the girlfriend. I think I asked her what greens were in the salad. When she got to cilantro I found out more about it. I still hate it, but at least I know my enemy!