Let’s not forget, however, that olives - and almost all other fruits, vegetables and domesticated animals - have been selectively cultivated for millennia to be tasty little nutrition machines: they wouldn’t be the treasure troves that they are if we hadn’t made them that way. It wasn’t simply a case of someone finding a tree and saying “Y’know, if we could get the bitterness of of these fat berries they’d make a pretty good martini”.
Dude, I wanna be *your *kid! 
More seriously, DARK chocolate has some mild bitter to it, Hershey’s certainly does not.
For some reason, little kids generally like beer a lot. I have no explanation for that one. They seem to lose their taste for it around 3 or 4 (until, of course, 15 or 16), but 2 year olds love the stuff - don’t leave it lying around unattended at parties with little kids present, ‘sall I’m sayin’.
Really? I don’t taste bitter in either of those. (Yeah, I just tried it. I’m such a nerd.) I get sweet and spicy in cinnamon and salty and, uh, “earthy” in cumin. Can’t figure out what else to call it, but cumin tastes like dark.
The bitterest one I can come up with in our supermarket is, as I said, dandelion greens and escarole, and those are still pretty mild. Nothing like bitter melon or ndole (bitterleaf).
The only way I’ve seen orange peels served is candied in sugar. No more bitter.
Ah, so it does. More sour than bitter, but yes, ever so slightly bitter.
Not that I can detect. If it’s there, it’s overwhelmed by the sulfur compounds and sugars.
Rhubarb should prob’ly go on the list, although, again, we dump so much sugar on it to get rid of the bitterness that most people probably don’t know what rhubarb on its own tastes like.
There is that evolutionary reason we don’t like bitters as much as sweets or fats - bitter alkaloids are often toxic, either in the “will kill you” sense or the “will send your mind on trippy expeditions” sense. Neither one nearly as useful as the caloric whallop in sweet and/or fatty things.
I often wonder if I have more taste buds than the average adult, because my tastes have remained appallingly simple as I’ve gotten older. I can’t stand the taste of coffee (love the smell) or olives (love the oil). I can’t stand wine. All of them are so strong, I feel like clawing my tongue out of my mouth and then twitching extensively.
I’ve gotten a little better. Used to be, I couldn’t stand beer, but I now enjoy a good Shiner or Ziegen bock.
I suspect that for most adults, they either lose a certain number of taste buds or lose the power of their taste buds or something, and the fading of those five true tastes - sweet, sour, salty, bitter, and umami - means that the remainder of the “flavors” can be picked up by the true taster - the nose.
The men in the den watching football always give the little kids beer. Then all of a sudden at some point it gets nasty to their tastes. Took me until I was 25 or so to like it again.
Endive is pretty bitter, but I don’t think many kids eat endive salads.
I’m not real clear on your point, here. Someone most likely found a tree with extremely fatty fruits and cultivated them to make them even fattier, sure–but surely they didn’t say, “y’know, if we could just add some bitterness to that berry, it’d make a great oil.”
Whynot, when you say that milk chocolate isn’t bitter, I think we’re talking about different things. I’m not suggesting that all those foods have bitterness as the primary taste, only that it’s a significant component of the taste. Even with milk chocolate, bitterness is significant.
And no, I’m not feeding beer to kids :). I was responding to the idea that bitterness is very rare in American cuisine. I had a friend, years ago, who was advised to add more bitter flavors to his diet by some sort of Chinese Medicine person, and it got me thinking about what bitter flavors are easily in reach.
Orange peels remain bitter even when candied (again, not the predominant flavor). Orange zest is used in many recipes.
Daniel
Heh. I have no recollection* of this, but one of the stories my mom used to love to tell was at a party my folks had when I was age two, I’d gone around getting sips of beer from everyone. Mom found me passed out in my bedroom and when everyone compared notes, figured out I’d taken quite a bit.
*Can’t imagine why.
Me too, but they get stuck in my teeth. photopat, marinating is a good idea. Last time I tried to put them directly on the rotisserie with a little seasoned salt and the results were disappointing.
OK, seriously…I think kids have a better sense of taste. Or is it possibly that everything is new to them? When you’re little that soda is SOOOO good but after a few years and a few thousand of them, it’s not as impressive. Is it the taste buds receiving stimuli more accurately or a brain that’s carefully categorizing this new phenomenon?
I’d think evolution would program our sense of taste to be more acute as children, so we would quickly learn exactly what NOT to eat.
Me too. I tasted bitterness in the cinnamon but I’m currently eating a bowl of ice cream so my palate is not really at neutral right now. The cumin tasted like I had licked wood. So I threw it away. Then I decided to try all the spices , half of which I promptly threw away including a thing of ground mace that looked like it had come with the house.
Yeah, I shoulda previewed better: it ought to have read “get the bitterness out of these fat berries”.
I love the Straight Dope.
[spicy hijack]
I have a bottle of caraway seed I don’t think I’ve ever cracked the seal on, but it’s moved with me three times now. Prob’ly time to purge.
I pitched my mace a while ago - I cook a lot, and I didn’t know what it was for. I figure if I ever come upon a recipe requiring mace, I’ll buy it then. I tossed my ground nutmeg in favor of some nutmeg nuts and a microplane - the difference really is phenomonal. I had to readjust my nutmeg quantities in every dish 'cause I didn’t need nearly so much fresh ground to equal the taste of preground.
[/spicy hijack]
LHOD, I see what you’re saying. When we’re talking medicinal or dietary bitters, though, we need BITTER! Gentian, bitter melon, Angostora bitters (which uses gentian) level bitter. Gets the bile flowing and really improves digestion. When I quit smoking, one drop of gentian tincture replaced my after meal cigarette, and got my GI tract moving even better than nicotine. A hint of bitter won’t really do it. Other cuisines do include BITTER, but not us. Sounds like your friend studied the same TCM I did to come to the same conclusion: Americans are wimps when it comes to BITTER.
I have heard that this is the reason kids tend to not like spicy food as much as adults.
Oh, and I had to brag: My son (almost 13) has always been a really good eater. He’ll try just about anything and likes a wide variety of ethnic foods. He especially likes Indian food. He has taken it upon himself over the last year to increase his tolerance of spicy foods. He likes them, but obviously they burn his mouth a little. He’s been training himself consciously to eat hotter and hotter food. I don’t have to set aside part of my chili anymore when I make it because he eats it fine at the level of hot that I like it (enough to make you need to blow your nose, not enough to make your eyes water).
An anecdote that illustrates his very un-child-like attitude about trying food: When he was younger, I was having some yogurt. (I rarely like yogurt–it’s something I get in the mood for every few years for a month or two, then it starts to gross me out again.) He asked if he could try some. I reminded him that last time he tried it (about a year before) he didn’t like it. He said “yeah but I want to try it again in case I like it now.” (he still didn’t, btw.)
And now just to make all the parents hate me: In first grade the kids filled out a “favorites” sheet (favorite tv show, color, etc) before parent night, and then at parent night the parents filled out the same sheet, then compared it to their kid’s to see how well they knew their child’s tastes. For “favorite food” we guessed that he would put chocolate. Nope. Broccoli. And within the last 2 years he told me “I think tofu is my new favorite food” (we were having Chinese). He also likes Brussels sprouts, though that may be partially because I tend to serve them with Hollandaise sauce. He begs for steamed artichokes, which we don’t do often because they’re so expensive. He once spent his allowance on carrots.
Yeah I know, it’s kind of freaky.
Fair enough. I’d still include a few other bitters on the scene: chocolate, good olives, certain ales (again, not for kids), and certain liquors and mixes, e.g., gin, tonic. Probably I’d also include grapefruit juice, as long as we’re not talking about cocktail; I might even include unsweetened cranberry juice, although it’s not especially common. Ooh, and wild blackberries! I wouldn’t include ruby grapefruit or domesticated blackberries, since they’ve had most of the bitter bred out of them, I think.
Daniel
Oh, yeah - a good gin and tonic is pretty bitter. Dumb kids, not to like gin and tonic!
I drink them because they remind me of my grandmother, who is 92 and rarely drinks anything but wine, but once we went to a restaurant and the waiter asked what she’d like to drink, and I translated “WHAT DO YOU WANT TO DRINK, GRANDMA?” and she said, “Oh, I’ll have a gin and tonic.” And she shotgunned that bad boy down like a sorority girl in Cancun and asked for another. Hell, who was I to say no?
ETA, and to hijack - every time I think about that it reminds me how easy it is to infantalize the elderly, because my first reaction was to think, you can’t have a drink! Good lord! But it isn’t like she isn’t old enough, and as long as she can make it back to the car with her walker whose business is it? It’s not like she makes a habit out of it.
So… did she get noticeably sloshed? If so, was it weird hanging out with grandma tipsy?
When my grams is tipsy, she starts kissing my boyfriends. That’s more than enough reason to keep her sober! :eek:
Why do adults have finer taste than children?
Because they’re ripe, of course.
Well, she fell asleep in her chair in front of the TV, but what else is new?
She and Grandpa always enjoyed a glass of wine after dinner, and if company was over they’d say “Would you like another glass?” so they could have an excuse to drink another one too. Now that Grandpa is dead I don’t know if Grandma still enjoys a glass alone, but two gin and tonics didn’t seem to knock her down much.