I have some gene that allows me to enjoy most sour foods. (My cousins have the same gene.) Over the years, I’ve heard several people talk about how sour rhubarb is. To me, it’s only mildly sour. I’ve been known to eat, rather than swallow, vitamin C pills, simply to increase the amount of sourness that I get. Although, oddly enough, I don’t like sauerkraut. I think it’s more the texture, rather than the taste.
When ice tea in restaurants comes with a slice of lemon, I take the lemon out and eat it, including the peel. Every once in a while, I’ll drink a shot glass of lemon juice.
I’m not sure if she does it any more, but one of my cousins used to take vinegar straight.
Drinking vinegar is a thing. The label on Bragg’s Organic Apple Cider Vinegar suggests diluting, though. Swallowing something that acidic straight up isn’t doing your stomach lining any favors.
A fancy-foods shop in my neighborhood offers a “tapas mix” – two varieties of green olives, tiny gherkins, pickled cocktail onions, and picked garlic cloves. Each bite delivers a powerful vinegar lashing, along with a healthy garlic/anchovy tang.
I started a thread last summer about craving vinegar during heat waves; I was making a pitcher of sherry vinegar-laced gazpacho every week.
Pretty soon I’ll start injecting vinegar directly into my veins.
Ever hear of something called ‘cleaning vinegar’? I had no idea it existed until a friend of mine told me about it. He claimed it was some super cleaner but when you look at the label it says it’s only 6% acidity. Regular vinegar is 5%. I tried it on a soap scum stain I’d been working on for quite some time and it didn’t even phase it.
I eat whole lemons too or at least I used to until my dentist told me to stop. I take a swig of pickle juice every morning. I like pickles fine but I mainly buy them for the juice.
If you want really sour sometime, get some Warheads candy. Those things are hard core.
After reading Dick Proenneke’s One Man’s Wilderness, I started drinking one of his favourite things: apple cider vinegar with honey and boiling water. It’s really good. I always have coffee on-hand though, so it’s been a while since I’ve had the vinegar drink.
Being a fan of sour foods, I’ve often wondered about their relative rarity in Western culture especially compared to their popularity in Asian cultures–not just sweet and sour but also combinations of salty, hot and sour–Chinese hot and sour soup would be the most familiar to Americans, and Tom Yum hot and sour soup is also available in almost every Thai restaurant.
Then there are all kinds of green mango salads, juices, smoothies, or tamarind juice and candies. Thai tamarind is a combination of sour, sweet, salty and hot. One of my Vietnamese favorites is salted plum soda which is a combination of sour, salty and slightly sweet.
Writing this is making my mouth water and I need to go find something sour to eat now!
I saw a cartoon in Playboy when I was a kid. Behind a Chinese restaurant, a cook is holding a bowl in front of a drunk, who is slumped against the building. A waiter is standing by the open door. The squatting cook angrily says, ‘You tell round-eye he just have to wait for his hot-and-sour soup!’