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The original was posted on /r/cooking by /u/Flogge on 2023-10-04 10:43:49.
I’m not sure if this is the right subreddit, but…
Yesterday while cooking I experienced the most strange phenomenon I’ve ever encountered while cooking: The “Angelle” tomatos (a type of date tomato) that I was using were literally neutralizing the taste of my food.
I was making thai papaya salad, which requires a few very intense ingredients:
- fish sauce
- lime juice
- garlic
- chillis
- sugar
- tomatos
- green papaya
I have made the salad countless times before and usually, the taste of the salad is quite intense, and 1/2 to 1 Tbsp of fish sauce and lime juice are plenty enough to produce the intense flavor. This time however it came out very watery, even after adding a ridiculous amount of fish sauce and lime juice (more than double the usual amount).
After some confusion and trial and error I was able to narrow it down to the tomatos and reproduce it with a simple test:
5 drops of fish sauce + 5 drops of lime juice on a spoon taste like you would imagine: very very intense, very salty, fishy and sour. So intense in fact that it made me shiver.
Now add 1/2 of this Angelle tomato (they’re very small) to the spoon and chew it all together, and the taste immediately becomes pleasantly mild.
Luckily I have another batch of that tomato, bought on another day, and tried it again with that other batch, and there was no such effect. It’s only the tomatos from this one special batch that preduce this peculiar effect.
Can anyone explain this?