Bitter and Sweet.
A pinch of salt in coffee or on grapefruit takes the edge off the bitterness more than a spoon of sugar does.
Bitterness warns of possible poisons, and children reject it; adults learn to enjoy it in coffee, tea, dark chocolate, beer, bitter greens, olives and 苦瓜 (bitter melon). The cook's task is usually to keep it in proportion. Three tools work. Salt is the strongest: it suppresses bitterness at the level of the tongue's receptors. Sugar masks it: sweetness and bitterness each reduce the other. Fat coats the tongue and binds some bitter compounds, which is why milk softens coffee.
Cooking adds two more: removal — salting and rinsing aubergine or bitter melon, blanching bitter greens, soaking olives — and dilution. And bitterness itself has uses: it cuts sweetness (a bitter caramel, a bitter orange marmalade) and freshens rich food. The workshop balances a cup of coffee.
Below: perceived bitterness and sweetness of a bitter drink as you add sugar, and how much a pinch of salt suppresses the bitterness (flavour bench, teaching model of the published suppressions).
- Name the ways to suppress bitterness.
- Compare salt and sugar against bitterness.
- Remove bitterness from vegetables.
- Use bitterness for balance.
Salt first, then sugar
In this model 6 % sugar cuts the perceived bitterness of a bitter drink by about 30 %, while a mere pinch of salt — 0.15 %, forty times less by weight — cuts it by about 26 % and adds no sweetness. That is why a pinch of salt in coffee grounds, on grapefruit or in a bitter-greens salad works so well, and why chocolate desserts and caramel carry salt.
For vegetables: salt sliced aubergine or bitter melon and leave it twenty minutes, then rinse and squeeze, to draw out some bitter juice; blanch bitter greens (mustard greens, rapini, dandelion) briefly in salted water; pair bitter foods with fat, sweetness or acid — 苦瓜 with egg or fermented black beans, endive with orange and walnuts, radicchio with balsamic. And use bitterness on purpose: a bitter orange marmalade, a dark caramel, a spoon of strong coffee in a chilli or a mole sauce, cocoa nibs on a sweet dessert.
Brew a cup of strong black coffee and divide it into three. Leave one plain, add a pinch of salt to the second and a teaspoon of sugar to the third. Taste in that order.
Terms
- Bitterness suppression
- A taste or ingredient reducing perceived bitterness.
- Masking
- Covering one taste with another.
- Supertaster
- A person unusually sensitive to certain bitter tastes.
- 苦瓜
- Bitter melon, prized for its bitterness in Chinese and South Asian cooking.
Sources
- A teaching value chosen for the course: the right order of magnitude and shape, not a measurement of a particular food.
- H. McGee, On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen, 2nd ed., Scribner, 2004.