What combination of basic tastes produces the flavor of normal store bought hydrogen peroxide?
It always tastes just sour to me, and has no other taste.
Keep in mind that what is happening in your mouth is not just your taste buds picking up a normal taste – the peroxide is mildly corrosive and acts to remove dead cells from your mouth (you’ll see the label often describes it as an “oral debriding agent”) and also to kill bacteria. So part of what you may be “tasting” is your own dissolving dead skin/tongue cells, part dying bacteria, and part the gases produced by these foamy chemical reactions.
So what basic tastes are those? Or are you saying that what I’m experiencing is a sensation rather than a flavor?
I ask because I recently had to scrub my tongue with peroxide (don’t ask). I noticed that while my tongue was out and I was scrubbing the peroxide with my toothbrush, I didn’t notice any flavor at all, but when I closed my mouth I did. I assumed this must mean it’s a bitter taste because I was under the impression that the back of the tongue was the part of the tongue that senses bitterness, and that was the only part I couldn’t reach with the toothbrush. The thing was, though, it didn’t taste bitter at all, in fact I couldn’t put it into any category (except gross), or any combination of categories. It definitely didn’t taste sour.
Anyway, I’ve since learned that those taste zones were all BS (although I remember a lab experiment in school that seem to show otherwise, but I guess that’s another thread). So my new theory was that it needed the saliva in my mouth to activate. But now, reading your reply I guess it makes more sense that it was the peroxide coming in contact with dead skin on the roof of my mouth that I was actually tasting. I’m still interested to know what those basic tastes were.
It’s both a taste and sensation IME.
My chemistry is too rusty to tell you what gas is being liberated or what the flavors of dissolving skin are made of. IME peroxide gives me a taste of “ozone” (which I’ve smelled in the lab, though I doubt that it’s actual ozonein your mouth).
Just wanted to add that gross or not, rinsing with peroxide is probably a pretty good idea as part of oral hygiene. It’ll kill just about any bacterium (including those that thrive in plaque and the gingivitis causing ones), it is more effective than any mouthwash I’ve seen (it’ll give you tolerable breath after a weekend of cigarettes and black coffee and garlic), it has a bleaching effect, and growing evidence suggests that oral bacteria seeping into the bloodstream play a substantial and detrimental role in cardiac degeneration (bugs tend to settle into the heart valves and do some damage there, IIUC). I gargle peroxide whenever I think of it, usually in the shower so I can get a few mouthsful of water to rinse out the foamy residue/taste.