One of my favorite cold drinks is unsweetened, black iced tea. Recently I decided to try a squirt of lemon juice in my tea–just enough to change the color of it slightly. It was good, of course–strong and refreshing and just very faintly astringent, exactly how I like it.
It also tasted…sweet. Just very slightly so, but sweet nonetheless. If you don’t believe me, make an unsweetened iced tea and spike it with lemon, and sip.
Now, I know that tea is somewhat acidic. And lemon juice is quite acidic, and one of the sourest tastes one is likely to taste. So how can two acidic liquids together be sweet? It seems like the opposite would be true. Where does the sweetness in the combo come from?
I don’t have the full answer, but I think it’s worth noting two things:
Despite tasting predominantly sour, lemons do contain a fair bit of sugar, so there is sweetness there, hidden under the perception of sour taste when the juice is sampled on its own.
Our sense of taste does not absolutely reflect the PH of the thing being tasted - that is, things like ‘sweet’ and ‘sour’ can balance each other out - so a solution that is acidic will taste sour; when sugar is added, it will taste less sour, without actually having become less acidic.
It is likely that you used a Meyer Lemon which is a crossbreed between citron and Mandarin, and brought over from China. All lemons have some sugar in them, Meyer lemons have a fair bit.
This sounds right. When mixed in tea, the sourness probably takes a back seat to the little bit of added sugar from the lemon.
As a side observation, I’ve noticed when adding lemon juice to something salted, like a soup, it makes the soup taste less salty, to the point where if I thought it was perfectly seasoned before, I feel like I need to now add more salt.
I guess the thing to try is the same amount of lemon juice in a cup of water. I think from memory of trying things like this, it will taste slightly sweet and not all that sour, compared to the experience of just sipping that much lemon juice from a spoon.
Sweet and sour are not chemical counterparts (whereas sweet and bitter sort of are, at least in so far as ‘bitter’ overlaps with ‘alkaline’ - it’s possible for things to be bitter tasting, but neutral PH)
But perceptually, sweet and sour are kind of opposites, in that either one seems to mitigate the other
I did not know about Meyer lemons until I read your post just now. Are they used as commercial juicing lemons? Because what I used was just regular old store-bought lemon juice from a green plastic bottle.
