The Bitter Truth

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Support for this show comes from Pure Leaf Iced Tea.

When you find yourself in the afternoon slump, you need the right thing to make you bounce back.

You need Pure Leaf Iced Tea.

It's real brewed tea made in a variety of bold flavors with just the right amount of naturally occurring caffeine.

You're left feeling refreshed and revitalized so you can be ready to take on what's next.

The next time you need to hit the reset button, grab a Pure Leaf Iced Tea.

Time for a tea break?

time for a pure leaf.

I was lamenting how sweet they were today and they weren't the bitter grapefruit of my childhood.

And I don't think it was just because I grew up in Australia.

I think 30 years ago or even longer than that, they were bitter.

And they really were much more interesting to eat.

than the sweet ones are today.

And I was thinking, then it started me thinking about all the foods seem to be getting sweeter and we appreciate less and less bitterness.

And so I thought, oh, good, there's another unloved subject that people dislike.

And so it's time to me to take up the torch and give bitter a better image.

And that is just what we're going to do today here on Gastropod.

I'm Cynthia Graeber.

And I'm Nicola Twilley.

And that was Jennifer McClaggan sharing her sadness about the sweetness of today's grapefruit.

She's the author of a new cookbook that gets deep into the history and science of bitter.

In fact, the book is called Bitter, a Taste of the World's Most Dangerous Flavor.

Scary stuff.

Bitter is one of the so-called basic tastes, you know, like salt and sugar and so on.

But it's a funny one.

It's one of the most maligned and one of the least understood tastes.

And yet there's all sorts of new science showing how important it is in ways we never even imagined.

Plus, it can actually taste good in moderation.

First, to start off the show, we have one basic question.

What is bitter?

And so I kind of thought I knew what bitter was, but I asked some friends, foodie friends, people who write about food and restaurant critics and people like that that I know, to send some ideas along, what they thought should be in the book.

And I got a lot of what I expected, like beer and tea and dark chocolate and chicories.

But you know, then people said things like sorrel.

and rhubarb.

And I'm thinking to myself, and even cheese, camembert cheese, you know, and I'm thinking, what's wrong with me?

I don't think any of those things are bitter.

And that's when I started discovering how fascinating and nuanced and what a wide range of tastes bitter actually is because unlike things like sorrel and rhubarb, which I think of as sour,

which is indicated by an acid, bitter things is like over a thousand different compounds that give you a sense of bitterness.

This is where bitter is really different from salt and sweet.

Our bodies have one main receptor whose job it is to taste all the different kinds of sweet chemicals we consume.

Fructose, glucose, saccharin, so on.

Scientists say there may be a couple of other receptors that also chip in to help us taste sweet, but it's basically one and done.

But in the case of bitter taste, rather than just having a small number of two or three or four sweet taste proteins, we have as many maybe as 25 functional genes.

and maybe even more proteins than that that make up our bitter taste receptors.

Paul Breslin is an experimental psychologist in the nutritional sciences department of Rutgers University.

He's also a researcher at the Monell Chemical Census Center in Philly, where they do a lot of work on the mystery that is bitter taste perception.

His point is that we have all these receptors and they pick up all these different chemicals, but which ones are picking up which chemicals and why?

We asked Sarah Tishkoff.

She's a geneticist at the University of Pennsylvania.

For many of these, we don't know.

So, for example, we don't know what we call a ligand or what the chemical is that triggers off the bitter taste.

We don't know, for example, which genes code for receptors that bind to those ligands.

So a lot of this is still not known.

We're still in the discovery process.

That means that this week's episode has even more unanswered questions than usual.

But in between them, we're going to introduce you to some of the different disguises that bitter wears.

It is time to get to know this mysterious taste a little better.

So let's start with chocolate.

That is a very good idea.

Nothing wrong with starting with chocolate ever.

I think we should all start our days with chocolate.

So does Alex Whitmore.

He founded a chocolate company in Massachusetts called Taza.

They make a kind of earthier Mexican style chocolate.

Cocoa beans, when they're fresh out of the fruit, fresh out of the pod, and they're moist, most of the time they're a purplish color, sometimes even bright purple or pink.

And if you bite into a cocoa bean fresh out of the cocoa pod, it's like biting into an apple seed.

It's a little bit bit more meaty than that, but it's very bitter.

It's intense.

Alex told me that fermenting the cocoa beans gets rid of bitterness, but you have to be careful.

If you over-ferment cocoa, you completely get rid of all bitterness and you end up with a very kind of

weak flavor profile product.

I think bitter is an important part in the actual flavor experience of a well-balanced chocolate bar.

So we look for, we don't look for super, you know, 100% fermentation rates.

We We want a little bit of bitterness in the final product, just enough to balance out the rest of the flavors.

You know, it's funny, as a kid, I thought dark chocolate was a mean trick.

Like, why would anyone like that?

But now I appreciate where Alex is coming from.

I don't go below 70% anymore.

I can't remember when I started to like darker chocolate, but of course now I love it.

There's no milk in any of Taza's bars, and I crave that bitter chocolate flavor.

That's just straight cocoa nib.

This is straight, no, no sugar.

No sugar, just straight up brown cocoa nib.

We call it cocoa liquor.

Okay, so let's see how bitter this is.

It's bitter, but it's not too bitter.

It tastes great.

Yeah, it has some acidity.

It's a lot of kind of unctuousness.

It's very fatty because there's a lot of cocoa butter in it.

It definitely has like that nice bitter edge at the end.

And we mix sugar in that, that completely rounds out the flavor profile, gives it a lot more body and depth.

Okay, so fortified with some chocolate, let's head into the history of bitter.

It goes way back.

Neanderthals have this reputation for just gnawing on bloody bones, but they had already evolved the ability to taste bitter.

A couple of years ago, archaeologists found evidence that they deliberately added bitter herbs and greens, like chamomile and yarrow, to their cooking pot.

But no one can agree why our ancient ancestors evolved to be able to taste bitter.

From an evolutionary perspective, sweet makes sense.

It's a big signpost that the food has lots of calories.

Salt makes sense.

We need salt.

But why bitter?

Well, I think the short answer is we don't really know.

Like we said, there are a lot of unanswered questions this episode.

But the sort of common wisdom is that most compounds that we taste are toxic to us at reasonable levels.

So it would seem that bitter taste in general is there to ward against eating too much of something that tastes bitter and being poisoned by it or even potentially killed by it.

But if that's the case, if bitter is just an aversive thing meant to make sure we don't poison ourselves, well, then why were Neanderthals adding it to their stew?

One way to try to understand why people evolved to eat bitter is to try to get at what type of variation there might be among different human populations.

If, for instance, some groups can taste one kind of bitter but not another, maybe that reflects something in their diet and in their environment that was important for survival.

I think that the idea that we've adapted to be able to detect different bitter substances is really interesting from an evolutionary perspective.

So I wanted to understand the genetic basis of that trait.

I wanted to understand what kinds of variation we see in populations around the world with different diets.

Humans evolved in Africa, so that's where you find the most genetic diversity.

So that's where Sarah went.

So when we started this project, we did have a hypothesis, and our our hypothesis was that we were going to see different patterns of variation in populations that have very different diets.

And you still find examples of those different diets in traditional communities in Africa.

There's some who practice a traditional hunting and gathering lifestyle.

They tend to have a diet that's very rich in carbohydrates from tubers, for example.

They eat a lot of protein from nuts and from meat.

Then they're pastoralists who would typically have a diet that's very rich in meat, blood, and milk.

So very high cholesterol, very high protein.

And then we have people who are traditionally agriculturalist, and they would have a diet very rich in grains.

And so we were really curious, do we see differences?

at the genes that play a role in bitter taste perception amongst these different populations.

Seems logical, right?

If bitter taste perception has evolved to stop us from eating dangerous foods, then it should have evolved differently in populations that eat completely different diets.

But that's not what Sarah and her team found.

They went around and got people to taste bitter things and tested their genes and they didn't find any correlation between different diets and different bitter perception.

This did not fit with our initial hypothesis.

They're all really similar.

But the experiment wasn't a total loss.

It actually tells us something really important about bitter.

What they did find is that there were lots and lots of different genetic variations.

That meant there was a huge range within each community in how intensely different people could taste bitter.

Sarah thought that the pastoralists would taste bitter one way, and the hunters would taste bitter a different way.

Instead, you have some hunters tasting bitter one way, and some other hunters another way.

And the same thing for the pastoralists.

Within the same community, eating the same diet, some people would find particular foods really bitter, and others wouldn't be able to taste the bitter at all.

And when we do see a pattern like that, sometimes it can be consistent with what's called balancing selection.

And what that means, it's when you have different genetic variants that are maintained in a population.

The idea here is that if there's a genetic variation that only has benefits or only has downsides, it either goes mainstream or dies out.

But if there's a variation that comes with some benefits and some downsides, then that variation can end up persisting but not taking over.

And that seems to be the situation with bitter, which is why there's so much variation in how each of us experience bitterness, more than for any other taste.

This all leads to a big kind of weird question.

If the only reason to be able to taste bitter was to spit it out and avoid getting poisoned, then you wouldn't see this kind of variation.

So the mutations that would make bitter seem less bitter or a little tastier, those mutations would die out.

And we would all think bitter foods were absolutely disgusting.

Those Neanderthals wouldn't have been adding it to their dinner.

So we think there's something else going on.

We think that these genes are playing a very important physiologic role.

Here is where it gets weird.

Those genes are coding for bitter receptors, and those bitter receptors are in your mouth, tasting your food, sure.

But according to Robert Margolsky, these bitter receptors can be found elsewhere in the body, too.

Robert is a colleague of Paul's at the Monell Chemical Census Center.

Aside from the bitter receptors in the mouth, which is the obvious place and the place where you have the most of them and the most sensitive forms of them.

You also have bitter receptors showing up in the lungs, in the upper airways, in some of your nasal passages, sinuses.

Obviously, our lungs are not tasting bitter, so why are there bitter receptors there?

Because they are doing something else altogether.

Let's take Robert as an example.

He has the kinds of genes that make him more sensitive to bitter tastes.

So, for example, I'm, I guess, a little bit unusual in that I don't like all sorts of bitter things.

I don't like coffee, I don't like beer, particularly strong beer, and I don't like dark chocolate.

But that super-sensitive bitter receptor also turns out to be hyperreactive to bacteria that cause sinus infections, which means they're super fast at triggering the immune system to fight off those bacteria.

And it turns out that the bitter taster-type people, like myself, have much less of a

propensity towards getting these bacterial sinus infections, whereas the bitter, insensitive, so-called non-taster types, those guys are much more prone to get these bacterial infections, and if they get them, they're less able to fight against them by their innate immune response.

It's an evolutionary trade-off.

Robert misses out on dark chocolate, but he doesn't come down with colds.

And on the other end of the spectrum, you get me.

I don't know what my genes look like, but I do know that I love dark chocolate.

And what that means is, even though I suffer through an annual winter sinus infection or even two, I also get the benefit of all those healthy antioxidants in the dark chocolate.

Because it turns out that all those bitter flavors in chocolate and beer and grapefruit and greens, those are good for us.

We're going to dig into that more in a little bit, but that's one of the reasons it makes sense to have evolved a reduced sensitivity to bitter taste.

But first, we are not not done with those bitter receptors in the human body.

They're deep in our gut, too.

There's much less known about the bitter receptors in the gut, and there's even much less known from the point of view of what they do.

It's actually been rather difficult to show that they are there and

in which cells they're present in, and then what they're doing.

And we're still not done.

They've even found bitter taste receptors.

Wait for it, this is my favorite in the testes.

You know, that really is kind of a weird one.

And in fact, in testes, you find bitter receptors, sweet receptors,

something called umami receptors, which respond to monosodium glutamate.

Again, we don't know exactly what the bitter receptors are doing in the testes.

Robert has done some research on knocking out those bitter receptors from mice's testes, and he has a guess.

He thinks it might have something to do with male male infertility.

It's also led to the speculation that you could actually actively use this to develop a form of non-hormonal male specific contraception to make a male pill.

I don't know exactly how that would work and it sounds like the scientists aren't sure either but I do like the sound of this.

It's like the holy grail of feminism.

But the truly bizarre thing about this is that it means that your food actually ends up tasting completely different.

And it's not for any nutrition-related reason.

It's based on these otherwise completely unrelated immune system things going on in your nasal passage.

And so it's actually kind of intriguing because it's also, in a way,

the implication is that you could have these genes that are important, let's say, for warding off infections, maybe.

And yet at the same time, they're altering how you're perceiving taste, how you're perceiving things in the world.

So that's kind of interesting, that it might have a different function, but it's still altering your taste perception.

So that's one reason we might have this variation in how we perceive bitter taste.

Some genes might make you reject bitter flavors and you get fewer colds, but then again, it might be useful to tolerate bitter for something good going on in our gut.

Or your balls, if you have them.

And here's where we get back to chocolate.

There is another reason to be able to tolerate bitter because it's good for us in small doses.

If you go to the compendium of all pharmaceuticals known as the physician's desk reference, almost any drug in a physician's desk reference that

is water-soluble, if you were to taste it, you would find that it tastes bitter.

That's Paul again.

And his point is that the chemicals that taste bitter have health benefits for the most part, which is why we've also consumed them for millennia.

I think wormwood is a classic one.

And wormwood is what's in vermouth, right?

Which Which gets its name from the German vermut, which means wormwood, and it was actually used to kill intestinal parasites.

And it's a very, very old herb medicinally.

You know, they've found traces of it in Chinese tombs and in ancient Egyptian papyri.

They've got like references to using wormwood.

And so for a long time, people have been using it medicinally.

And the alcohol thing is linked to a way to keep these herbs over time is to extract them.

Alcohol is very good at extracting the flavors and the chemical compounds so they would

just

soak them and put them into alcohol so they would make a drink out of them.

And it's interesting now because they're testing in various tombs and they've discovered traces of wormwood and it's like an anti-inflammatory and it's actually being studied in Pennsylvania and used to treat colon and lung cancer.

So I mean I I don't think the ancient Egyptians knew that, but they knew that it did have health benefits.

So, in fact, there's a lot of drinks, alcoholic drinks that we drink today that began really as medicines.

We talked about this in our cocktail episode: bitters and cocktails.

These were meant to help pep you up.

You would take like just a sip of them to improve your health.

Or, as you know, bitterness is a great aid to appetite.

It makes you hungry because it stimulates the gastric juices.

And so, people would take like a small shot of these things as a prelude to a meal.

So I think going all the way back to Roman times Romans would consume these bitter herbs as digestive.

So at the end of a meal they would drink some sort of tea or tincture or concoction

of all different kinds of herbs that would taste absolutely vile.

And they were basically consuming it as medicine to sort of facilitate digestion.

And I think this has spilled over into

various kinds of liqueurs that we might call aperitifs that are alcoholic, usually sweet alcoholic beverages that have all kinds of

herbal extracts in them.

And I think that this is actually a carryover from this

ancient, ancient idea that bitter herbs can be something that facilitates digestion.

And I also think this is a really interesting idea.

I don't think there's a lot of science behind it but it's particularly intriguing today because we now know that bitter receptors are expressed not only in our mouth but throughout our GI tract.

We don't really know why they're there so you wonder if maybe the Romans were onto something.

Good news for Campari fans.

Meanwhile one of my favorite drinks, gin and tonic, is basically a bitter medicine disguised with booze.

The quinine in tonic water is a potent anti-malarial and the gin is what helped persuade British colonists to take their medicine.

I'll take that medicine any day.

And now, it is time for another little bitter story.

Pour yourself a cold one.

We've introduced you to the bitterness in chocolate, but now we're going to talk about the bitterness you find in beer.

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Charlie Sheen is an icon of decadence.

I lit the fuse and my life turns into everything it wasn't supposed to be.

He's going the distance.

He was the highest paid TV star of all time.

When it started to change, it was quick.

He kept saying, no, no, no, I'm in the hospital now, but next week I'll be ready for the show.

Now, Charlie's sober.

He's going to tell you the truth.

How do I present this with any class?

I think we're past that, Charlie.

We're past that yeah somebody call action aka charlie sheen only on netflix september 10th originally it had things like different plants in it but it didn't have hops in it and hops are really what makes the beer we know today bitter

they were added probably around 1820 something like that and what hops did is it's really interesting because they are very bitter not only did they add bitterness to the beer, but they have a whole lot of antibacterial agents in them, hops, and so they preserve the beer.

And so it meant that they could keep the beer for longer.

Up until that point, after a couple of weeks, the beer would just go bad, but they actually preserve it.

And

because of these antibacterial properties in the hops, it's very, very good for you, right?

They use hops to

treat disease and they use it to treat women in menopause because it has a lot of natural estrogen in it.

What's interesting is like probably a glass of lager or IPA is better for you than a cup of green tea because there is more phytochemicals and antibacterial things in there.

I asked my friend Dan Frompson about beer.

Former beer writer, now just beer obsessive.

And he had an interesting theory about bitterness and the rise of craft beer.

You could view the phenomenon of extremely bitter beers as kind of dating back to that moment in craft beer where there was such a need to sort of reach the average beer drinker and say, no, you know, those watery lagers that you're used to, like craft beer is totally different.

So we're going to hit you over the head with these really bold flavors.

And now people have tried those beers and said, oh, you know, this is fine.

But, you know,

in some cases, some of those extreme beers may not have been the pinnacle of craftsmanship and we're just a little too crazy.

That is so true.

I love the complexity of craft beer, but I'm not really a fan of that super hoppiness in so many beers lately.

Well, you are in luck because Dan says the craft beer movement is moving away from that.

And there is plenty of bitterness but the bitterness is actually sort of more integrated with those fruity notes and isn't the prominent thing that really just hits you like this thing that dries out your mouth and just is super dominant.

So our beers have been getting more bitter, though fortunately and hopefully not too much for too much longer.

And our chocolate has been getting more bitter too.

I am fine with that.

But strangely, the opposite has been happening with our fruits and and vegetables.

Remember how Jennifer said she couldn't find bitter grapefruit?

The same thing has been going on with all our produce.

It is all getting less bitter.

We have a natural, evolutionary preference for sweet, and that's what plant breeders have been capitalizing on.

There have been tons of studies on this, and it is actually kind of amazing how much less bitter our fruits and veggies have become.

Wild tomatoes can have as much as 166 times more bitter compounds than grocery store ones.

And grapefruit, those older white varieties, have as much as 50% more bitter chemicals than the sweet, red, or pink ones that are popular today.

That's not all bad.

We all know that people don't eat enough veggies, and people eat even fewer veggies that taste sort of bitter, like Brussels sprouts or cabbage, and they eat even fewer of the really bitter ones, like dandelion greens and radiggio.

So maybe breeding them to be less bitter will make people eat more vegetables.

You know, there are such a lot of good things in...

bitter as long as we can get as close to, you know, and it's such a shame because bitterness has such a negative thing that plant breeders are breeding it out of plants, right?

Like for what we started talking about was the grapefruit.

Grapefruit are all pink and red mainly now.

There are very few white grapefruit and they have less and less of this chemical called narrogen, which is a really beneficial phytochemical.

Some of the foods that are bitter and painful and irritating are actually very healthy.

They're full of vitamins, they're full of calories, they're very nutritious, and they really, the things that are painful in them and the chemicals that are bitter and irritating may not only not be toxic for us, they may actually be medicinal.

That compound that makes grapefruit bitter, that's been shown to have anti-ulcer and anti-inflammatory properties to inhibit the growth of breast cancer cells and to induce cervical cancer cells to commit suicide.

Quercetin is the chemical that makes green tea and broccoli and red wine bitter, and it also seems to help protect against lung cancer.

And then the various bitter-tasting compounds in cocoa and coffee beans, they've also been linked to a reduced risk of cardiovascular disease.

So, some of the most potent chemicals that plants have, the ones that researchers think might be the best for us, these are also some of the most bitter.

And remember those bitter receptors all over our airways and guts?

Who knows how reducing the level of bitter chemicals in our food will affect them?

We don't even know what most of them do.

There might be another way to deal with this issue, to get people to eat more bitter foods.

What if we could keep all those bitter chemicals in food but stop you from tasting them?

In some ways, it's kind of the holy grail from a commercial point of view, and it's actually a pretty simple idea.

The idea is to find a drug that blocks the activity of the receptors on your tongue that pick up bitter.

Robert says to think of the receptor as a lock, and the bitter blocking chemical is the key.

That's basically what we're trying to do.

We're trying to find a specific key that will fit into the door lock in a way that will let us put it in the constantly inactive or locked position and we'd like to do that with all 25 to 30 bitter taste receptor proteins.

Robert and his colleagues have been working on this for five or so years now.

They found some bitter blockers but they don't know if they'll work on all the different bitter receptors or even if they work on everybody.

Either way, they say it's at least another five years away from market.

He told us that the people who are most interested in this new compound are pharmaceutical companies.

That's because a lot of drugs are bitter and it's incredibly tough to get kids and the elderly to take their liquid medicine if it's too bitter.

So that's the main interest right now.

But he can also imagine how these bitter blockers might be a kind of powder that you could add to coffee and then skip the cream and sugar.

Or it could be something that you could sprinkle on your greens.

Surprisingly though, one big opportunity he sees is in processed foods.

This is something I actually didn't realize, but all of those super intense industrial processes that turn wheat and corn into cookies and crackers and chips, things like centrifuging and heating and dehydrating and so on, they tend to break down some of the proteins in food into bitter-tasting compounds.

So to diminish the bitter taste in the processed foods, it's very common to throw in salt and sugar and fat.

If you could instead throw in some of these bitter antagonists or bitter blocking agents, you could potentially have a more healthful food product by decreasing the amount of sugar, fat, and salt.

So we can and do breed bitter out, but that's not ideal.

And we can figure out how to block it.

I can see how that's useful, at least with medicines.

But why can't we just learn to love bitter for itself?

That's what makes me upset when you hear that they're breeding a sweeter form of Brussels sprout, you know?

Like, we're going about it in the wrong way.

What we should be educating people is to appreciate the bitterness, not just making everything sweeter and sweeter and sweeter, because that's a very slippery slope that is not going to improve our health.

And

it's not going to improve the flavor of what we eat or the food that we eat either, because it'll just be so boring and flat and lacking in interest without that bitterness.

In one study, researchers found that only about 5 to 8% of the calories Americans eat are from bitter foods.

But some cuisines are better at this than others.

It's time for a story from my friend Tony Mazzali.

It's very time.

She's been living in Italy for more than a decade, and she founded a food tour company called Taste Florence.

It is, in fact, quite tasty.

Bitter greens are all over the place.

They are,

as far as I can tell, every region of Italy and used abundantly.

The more I travel, the more things I discover, and I can't believe it's just endless.

One of the things I discovered on a trip this

spring, right before my birthday, I went down to Puglia.

They take chicoria,

which is a type of chicory, and they cook it with fava beans.

So they kind of parboil the chicoria and then they make a puree of fava beans, and then they just douse it in olive oil.

So it's just this beautiful contrast.

I called her up to ask about how Italians love their bitter greens, and she could not stop coming up with examples.

I could go on all day.

And then, of course, as we already mentioned, Italians also love their bitter dija steve.

These are called amaro.

Tony has a favorite after-dinner bitter.

The amaro di capo, if you just have that either in a really chilly little shot glass or even on the rocks in the summer, it's beautiful.

It's way better than limoncello, I'm sorry.

Yeah, I can't do limoncello anymore.

It's too sweet for me now.

But the Italians haven't got a lock on bitter.

Jennifer McLagan's new cookbook is all about subtle ways to introduce a little bit of bitterness back into your dinner without pain.

I remember once a friend got dandelion greens in her CSA box from a local farmer and she had no idea what to do with them.

She was petrified by the bitter taste.

But there are ways to tame that flavor.

Heat cooking the greens, that tames the bitterness, so does salt, and then there's our favorite, you can add fat.

The dandelion greens is a great example because you can make yourself a nice hot bacon dressing.

So you have the fatty bacon, which is the fat will balance off the bitterness.

And because it's hot, it will subdue those dandelion greens that are a bit tough.

That will make them like softer and easier to eat.

So like like a fatty dressing is one way or a hot fat is one way to subdue the bitterness.

In fact, there's ways to weave bitter into your whole meal.

You could have a very subtle, very sophisticated, bitter-themed dinner party that would actually be completely delicious and people would still want to be your friend afterward.

I don't think you want to make a meal with bitter everywhere because that's way too much for people, but I think there's ways you it's a good thing to start with bitter and that could be you know for people like us who like a tipple, that could be with like a bitter cocktail.

Could even be with something as simple as a beer.

So you get a little bit of bitterness because that starts the appetite.

And then depending on what you're cooking, I'd like to have bitter somewhere in the meal.

And say perhaps you're doing duck, like duck breast or something.

Then that's rich and fatty and delicious.

And it's certainly a good counterpoint to that is bitter greens or a bitter green salad to balance out the fat of the duck and perhaps you can have just a touch of bitterness at the end of the meal in liquid form of course but probably in something as simple as like

even an orange dessert that's got the zests with some of that bitter pith on it to give you a little bit of bitterness a bitter chocolate tart so there's just a touch of bitter at the end yes please that sounds delicious i want that duck with bitter greens right now jennifer's point is that it's easy to work with bitter in just normal North American cooking.

But there are cuisines that really embrace it.

Italian's one that kept coming up in our conversations, and you heard from Tony about those greens in the Amari.

And lots of Asian cuisines use bitter really well, too.

Which brings us to our next little bitter vignette.

Remember Heather Lee, the researcher who told us all about the scandalous dine-and-dance Chinese restaurants of the 20s in our episode on American Chinese food?

I hated bitterness as a child, but it came up a lot on the dinner menu because because my parents loved it.

And now as an adult, I really enjoy the taste of bitter melon.

And so we would have it in soups stuffed with pork, so it would be a very sort of clear light broth.

It also would be sauteed with black beans.

So it came up maybe like once every other week.

simply because my brother and I refused to eat it.

But now I remember, it must have been some time in my late 20s where I thought, I really, all of a sudden, I think I was maybe living in Germany at the time and Chinese food is hard to find.

And I stumbled into a random neighborhood Chinese restaurant.

I discovered they were Taiwanese, my family's Taiwanese, and I was really happy.

And they were eating bittermelon as a family sort of meal in this restaurant.

But bittermelon wasn't on the menu.

And I realized, oh my goodness, I'm having a flashback to my childhood where now I see this like moment of family and family communing over a meal.

And they're eating bittermelon.

And I don't get to have a taste of it.

And I missed home.

I missed bitterness, which is such an odd thing.

Anyway, so whenever I eat bittermelon now, I think of my disgust as a child, but also it's there's a sweetness to the taste.

Bittermelon or bitter gourd as some people call it is really bitter.

It's the world's most bitter vegetable.

But Jennifer loves it.

It is actually her favorite bitter vegetable of all.

I'm going to have to say, because it really is bitter and it's like, you know, wake you up bitter, is bitter gourd.

And I do like that.

And some days, in fact, even my husband said, Oh, we need to have some of that.

I really feel like bitter good.

Because once it's a vegetable you learn to like, you find yourself craving it.

There's like a flavor in there that's really

really kind of special.

She has a recipe in her book that she recommends for bittermelon beginners.

It's just a simple Thai veg curry, so I tried it.

All right, and here it is: bittermelon.

Give it a rinse.

I had the same idea.

Let's give this crazy melon a try.

Okay, I scooped all the seeds out and now I am chopping up this kind of knobby, warty, cucumber-like bitter melon.

Next step, cut the melon halves into half-inch slices.

Place the slices in a colander, toss with some salt.

Let's stand for these now.

Alright,

always good to read this first.

That's not gonna happen.

That's me, never read the instructions first.

I made the probably not so smart decision to go all out, and I made the dish entirely with bitter melon.

Jennifer suggested in her recipe notes that if you're a first-timer you should maybe mix in other vegetables like eggplant or red pepper or potatoes.

It's like anything.

It's like the chocolate.

You need to start out in small steps.

You need to go if you if you're so used to the sweet one you can't jump up to the 99%

cocoa content.

You won't be able to enjoy it at all.

You know, you have to keep trying things and

re-educate your palate to like these things.

So my next mistake was trying it raw.

Should I try it raw for

science?

I'm gonna really regret this, aren't I?

Oh,

dear god, man.

Starts off deceptive like a like a cucumber and then it just keeps building.

Oh dear.

I hope it improves once it's cooked.

Here we go.

It looks nice.

I'm gonna dive straight in.

It's still bitter.

It's quite nice, actually.

I mean, well, I don't know.

I'm not sure I'm crazy about the aftertaste.

It's actually really not good.

I want to like it.

Let me try again.

I'm halfway through, and I'm beginning to soften towards this bitter melon.

It's a nice contrast with the tomatoes.

I feel like it adds something.

I don't want more of it, but I would put it in again.

Nikki, you had the right idea to mix in other vegetables, as I said.

My main mistake was not doing that.

I was making this not just for me, but also for my partner Tim, and he loves hoppy beer, so I figured why not go all in?

It's a bittermelon dish, right?

Okay, so it is boiling away.

There's tofu and tomato with the

coconut and the Thai chili powder.

Here, let's see, you couldn't hear the bubbles.

I have to say, it really looks beautiful.

It smells nice and the colors are great.

I don't think I'm going to like it, but I don't know.

It looks pretty good.

Oh my god.

Oh my god.

Ugh.

Ugh.

It's vile.

Sorry.

I don't think you're acting.

That's the most horrible thing I've ever tasted.

Okay, I need to try it.

I'm almost crying.

I'm laughing so hard.

And I guess he made that classic face, you know, with the grimace and he just wanted to spit it back on the table, right?

That's pretty much what happened.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Well, you were a bit mean.

You should have let him into it, you know, because now he might never touch it again, which will be a shame, right?

Because it's super good for you, right?

It's super good for you, bittermelon, right?

They have all this

stuff that they're discovering about how good it is and they're using it to treat diabetes and cancer.

So you might want to go the other route and just put a few little pieces in something else.

I'll sneak a couple pieces in here and there.

Tim, you didn't hear that.

The best part I thought was actually not so much the bittermelon itself as the fact that it really made my green beans and my red pepper just taste deliciously sweet.

Yeah, that's what's interesting because you see, that's what before that, you know, it makes those things that can get a little boring much more interesting because you've put that bitterness in there, right?

And this is what I want people to understand.

I mean, you know,

that is a bitter dish, but you can add bitter to lots of things without making it bitter, but it'll just make everything else in that dish so much more interesting to eat.

That's what's important about bitter.

You take it out and your cooking is flat and boring.

Okay, so before we started this episode, I was down with the health benefits of bitter.

And I like tea, dark chocolate, gin, and tonic.

I can enjoy some bitter.

But I did kind of think of bitter, especially bitter greens, as something you had to suffer a little.

Like it's good for you, but not actually good.

I might be more with Jennifer on this.

I do crave bitter greens, but Jennifer thinks that part of the problem is that we don't have a good way to describe bitter flavors.

That's the only word we have, bitter.

That's it.

Maybe we need an entirely new vocabulary.

Yeah, I think so, because, you know, it doesn't really do the taste or flavor, however you want to define it justice and I think it's a such a negative word very rarely does someone say oh gee that was a deliciously bitter meal like you know

you know bittersweet is about the nicest thing you can say about bitter and because it's applied to chocolate so that's I think we need a new vocabulary when we're describing bitterness but that's you know it's difficult to create that.

I don't know.

It's kind of, you know, like I would say like, you might like to say, I don't know if aggressively bitter is a good thing,

you know, deliciously packery, you know, because I think there's things that deliver bitterness, not just on your tongue, like that sense of astringency in celery leaves and the puckeriness of a, or the pepperiness of arugula and different kinds of greens.

Luckily, other languages have a head start on this.

We can learn from them.

I loved the

Japanese word for tangy bitterness.

Shibui, I think is how you say it.

yeah.

And you know, I love that reference to it, you know, like a silver-head

gentleman in a well-tailored suit, right?

You know, of course, my image was straight away George Clooney, but alas he got married, so now I have to find someone else to take up that image.

But I think it is because, you know, they say sophisticated, you know, gentleman, but with a bad boy aura.

And I think that's something about bitterness, because I think bitter is a very sophisticated taste, but it has that little hint of danger, which makes it kind of fascinating to play with in the kitchen.

Picturing George Glooney does make me feel differently toward dandelion greens, I'm not gonna lie.

Do we need a woman version of this for folks who prefer females?

I'm trying to think of who that might be.

Like, maybe Helen Mirin.

Hmm.

No, no, I know who is the lady version of bitter.

Kate Blanchette.

Oh, that's totally it.

She is perfect.

She's bitter.

She's mysterious mysterious and fascinating and absolutely gorgeous.

And she is far from boring.

It's like a sophisticated taste, you know?

It's not mainstream or bubblegum, you know?

It's not Taylor Swift.

That seems to be the key to appreciating bitter.

You have to work a little for it.

Heather already told us that the Chinese don't think bitter is necessarily easy to love, but they do love it.

One of the contrasts that I would say is that bitterness plays both a social and emotional role in addition to being a taste that is prominent in some dishes.

There's even an expression for it in Chinese.

You know, there's a phrase that comes up often to eat bitterness or it's both thought of as

a description of somebody's life having gone through something very difficult, lots of hardships, but also as a virtue.

Somebody who's able to eat bitterness is somebody who is able to withstand a lot and persevere.

So, I mean, so when you say a child

is capable of eating bitterness, it's sort of to compliment him or her, to say that, you know, he or she has the characteristics to really do well later in life because they know what it means to suffer and persevere.

Aha, maybe this is how we can convince people to eat more bitter.

By appealing to their egos.

Maybe we can teach Americans to like bitterness.

Makes you stronger.

That's it for this week's episode.

For the links to Jennifer's book, as well as that bitter melon recipe, go to our website, gastropod.com.

Thanks to Jennifer McLagan for telling us all about her bittersweet adventures.

Thanks also to Paul Breslin and Robert Markolsky of the Monell Chemical Census Center, and to Sarah Tishkoff, who spoke to us just hours after getting off a plane from Africa.

And thanks to our storytellers.

Alex Whitmore is the founder of Taza Chocolate.

Tony Matsalia founded and runs the food tour company Taste Florence.

Heather Lee is a postdoc at MIT and assistant professor at NYU Shanghai.

And Dan Frompson is an editor at the New York Times Magazine, as well as a total beer geek.

In two weeks, join us to investigate why some of us absolutely hate cilantro.

Seth Godin is on my team here.

You know, my enmity for cilantro runs deep, but it runs right next to my dissatisfaction and frustration with the public's lack of empathy.

for those of us who just can't stand cilantro.

And you're both missing out.

Check back in two weeks to hear all about the science and history of this divisive herb as well as this ongoing argument.

Yeah, like I said, you're both wrong, but the science and history of why is fascinating.

Till next time.

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