I’m with you on this point. It tastes like soap, but in a good way. FWIW, I also kind of like the soap flavor beans from JB’s Berttie Bott’s Every Flavor Beans.
Put me in the “soap” column. Fresh cilantro, once placed in a dish, makes the entire thing taste like it was marinated in Dawn soap. The worst is when it is thrown in something you wouldn’t expect it in, like a chicken wrap. All of a sudden, two bites in, it hits you…
I love cilantro. It must be genetic. And yes I will eat the soap flavour in Bertie Bott’s too.
Oh, man. Thank you, thank you folks. I thought I was alone. The special lady friend puts fucking PILES of the stuff in everything she cooks. It’s vile.
And lemongrass! Everything has lemongrass. I’ll be enjoying a great rice dish, and I’ll pick something out of my teeth, asking, “Honey? Did you pee on a plank of balsa wood, then chop it up in my dinner?”
Ooh, I love lemongrass. Lemongrass & cilantro soup. Deee-lish! Add some hot pepper. Num, num!
Actually, I love rosewater. But I hate, HATE coriander/cilantro.
Damned devil-herb finds its way into far too many restaurant foods. :mad:
ETA: And I’m definitely with **Dosipede **on the lemongrass, too. Balsa is a good description!
No – it has never not tasted like soap to me.
My husband was chopping cilantro the other day, and because there were bits of it on the cutting board, a speck got onto my daughter’s carrot sticks. She tasted it and said, “Wow, that’s worse than salt water!” (She’s only 6, so salt water is so far the worst thing she has ever tasted…)
My utter loathing of cilantro has mellowed over the years to an active dislike. I used to go to a vietnamese restaurant where they had lovely fresh spring rolls (the kind wrapped in a soft sheet of rick stick). Unfortunately, it was a crapshoot whether the greens would be mint or watercress (heavenly!) or cilantro (tastes like hate!). Ordering was like a $3 game of Russian Roulette. I have also been known to suspiciously sniff flat-leaf parsley, because cilantro is often misfiled at the store.
I also taste an intolerable soapiness in papaya – I know there’s a genetic component to that too – I’m wondering if it’s the same one?
Me too - can taste the soap and actually kind of like it. Hell, it’s most of the reason why I order Meximelts from Taco Bell, for the cilantro they put in them. Yum!
But my husband and FIL hate the stuff.
Off topic but my brother hates brussels sprouts, broccoli and cauliflower. It was very recent that I learned that they were in the same family of vegetables.
There must be some chemical component that is off putting to him much like cilantro is to some people.
I love all three of said vegetables, in fact they are probably my favorite three. No accounting for genetics I guess. And we did have the same parents in case you were wondering.
Add me to the hater’s club. I can detect it if a sprig has been waved over my tortilla soup or burrito. It makes me crazy to see all the recipes that call for a “fresh bunch of cilantro”. Ugh!! Why not just shave a few pieces of lever 2000 into the dish!:mad:
That chemical component would probably just be “the flavor.” 
Me? I hate anise. Blech. I won’t claim I’m allergic or anything, but if it got trendy and people started putting it in everything, I think I might start telling people I was allergic to it.
I agree. Members of the brassica genus all have a signature funk in their flavor profile. I don’t think it’s genetics that makes gravitycrash’s brother hate foods from this genus, he simply doesn’t like that flavor. I also think that a lot of cilantro haters don’t necessarily have the cilantro-hating gene (has that even been proven? So far as I know, it hasn’t); they simply don’t like the flavor of cilantro. I mean, I know what they mean when they say “soapy” flavor, but I like it.
Ya know, that does explain a lot.
sighs, and puts cilantro on foods best to be eaten in moderation 
<< You are what you eat, so stay away from the jerk chicken. >>
That’s not lowered blood presure, that a bit more of your life-essence departing for the land of death and damnation every time you eat it.
Genetic studies HAVE found that some people can taste compounds that others can’t, and that those flavors can be quite unpleasant. It shouldn’t be hard to believe that he flavor of cilantro may very well be different for different people, and not simply a matter of “oh, you just don’t like that flavor.”
Personally, I suspect there is a “soapy cilantro” gene, perhaps in a few different varieties like the PTC gene in the article above, and possibly it’s even the same gene. I can taste PTC, and I taste the soapiness in cilantro too. I don’t particularly like it because if there’s cilantro in something, it overwhelms ALL the other flavors. I don’t find it retch-inducingly vile like some people though, and I even find I do like it in certain salsas.
I came in here to post this. As others have been mentioning, cilantro’s main flavor components are grassy, green - very chlorophylly and quite similar to parsley. That being said I wouldn’t say it’s an unfair comparison to relate some of the taste to soap.
Of course this might just be the vogue new conformation bias in action. I distinctly recall a grade school experiment to determine who the supertasters in the group were. I believe it was a small strip of chemical-impregnated paper placed on the tongue, to some it was intensely bitter, to others (and myself) we noticed nothing out of the ordinary.
Bell peppers, though. Fuck bell peppers.
Sure. We did PTC tests in high school. I don’t doubt that there may be a genetic component to it, but I don’t necessarily think that everyone or even the vast majority of people who hate cilantro have this anti-cilantro gene. I taste PTC fine; I can taste the soapy quality of cilantro. But I happen to like cilantro. It is a very aggressive flavor for me, too–fresh and green, but with a soapy and back-of-the-tongue bitter astringency. I understand how people say it could overwhelm all other flavors. I could see how it’s an acquired taste for many–hell, it was an acquired taste for me.
In the end, genetics or not, it really doesn’t matter. If you don’t like it, you just don’t like it. Whenever I make anything that contains cilantro and have people over, I ask, just in case, because it is a relatively common dislike.
I am with you on this. It does taste soapy to me, but yet…I like it. 
And I LOVE beef Meximelts for the same reason!!