If you don’t know about the experiment, here is a good video.
While I was looking for a video to send to a friend (who amazingly remained unaware of the grape plasma phenomenon), I came across one that advised, “don’t eat the grape afterward.”
Assuming you let it cool so you don’t burn yourself, is that advice necessary? Would the grape remains be bad for you, and if so, why?
I’ll leave it to an expert to comment on whether you can/should eat the grape or not, but as someone who has done this experiment several times for myself and friends, I will say that I’ve never really considered the grape particularly attractive for eating afterward. It has a bad, burnt smell and is extremely mushy. Pretty much the opposite of appetizing.
Yeah, it did occur to me that the advice might simply be based on, “grape will taste gross!” But since some pretty significant molecular changes have apparently occurred, I’m wondering if the grape remains are actually bad for you.
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The products of the pyrolysis of the grape are likely to contain some things that technically, you might not want to eat like carboxyls, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons and carbon particulates, all of which can be carcinogenic, but it’s just one grape, and those same things will be present in far greater doses in, say chargrilled BBQ pork.
Eat the grape. I challenge anyone to provide a peer reviewed study that demonstrates the resulting cooked grape contains enough unhealthy chemicals to create a problem (that is NOT present in a regularly cooked grape)
edit…Oh lord…I sense this will result in an urban legend that you aren’t supposed to cook grapes because they will kill you.
Cooked grapes will kill you!?! I have to tell people about this!
And whatever you do, don’t let them dry out!
This would seriously interfere with my annual baking of grape pies.
Seriously! What are people thinking when they put that stuff in everything?
– 74westy, who ate like a pound of raisins one night in 1972.
And, for god’s sake, do not squeeze the juice and dry it to later dissolve the extract in water and place in a cool, dark place for 3 weeks.
I expect this is the reason for the warning. Because dumb people won’t let it cool.