Kitchen chemistry question

October 12, 2019 5:00 PM

I tried making a lemon poppyseed loaf mix with vinegar plus baking soda as an egg substitute, to middling success. Then I drank some “light” pink lemonade—again from a mix—and it tasted terrible. Not bubbly, just unpleasant. Now that I’ve been finished with my slice for a while, the same glass of lemonade tastes fine. What kind of reaction happened?

(The loaf was fluffy and tender in the middle but bitter at the edges, from the baking soda, I suppose.)

posted by Countess Elena to Food & Drink (3 answers total)

I'd be very interested to find out if anyone had an explanation. There's so much going on in baking, and also with artificial sweeteners that I wouldn't know where to start guessing.

Some years ago I experienced something similar, with oatmeal cookie dough + root beer tasting like coffee. Because I knew the end flavour, I thought that I'd be able to figure out where it came from, but I just didn't take enough organic chemistry to crack it.

Some leads:
Flavorful compounds are usually esters, ketones, and... Mumble mumble.

Baking soda (my suspected cause and yours, too), is amphoteric and reacts with strong (or strong ish) acids and bases.

You *can* end up with a sodium salt of a previously smelly thing + water + CO2, but I don't know how to tell if you *will*.

Those salts don't smell (as much?)

Water and carbon dioxide will give you even more carbonate ions because of mumble mumble Le chatelier mumble, further changing the smell and therefore flavour.

Since most of flavour is smell, that is the road I went down. I was not satisfied with that because I wanted to know exactly what molecule turned into what other molecule to give the coffee smell, and I couldn't figure that out.

Good luck!
posted by Acari at 7:31 AM on October 13, 2019 [2 favorites]

Medium-wild (not too wild) guess: something in the loaf overloaded your sweetness (mid-tongue) taste buds, sort of like brushing your teeth with mint toothpaste. So then when you followed with lemonade, the overloaded receptors didn’t have any headspace to accommodate the sweetness, but the less-overworked bitter receptors at the sides were available for the other flavors in the lemonade, which would otherwise have been balanced with sweetness. I think this is what happens in the “toothpaste-orange juice” scenario.
posted by toodleydoodley at 8:13 AM on October 13, 2019 [4 favorites]

I'm not certain how vinegar and baking soda is a egg substitute, unless the recipe originally called for whipped egg whites as leavening? Anyway, the problem is probably with bicarbonate in the food adding to the existing bicarbonate buffers in your saliva to decrease hydrogen ions which normally would produce a sour taste. The sour taste of the lemonade mix contributes most of its "flavor", so when that is buffered you taste the other things in the mix instead.

The toothpaste problem is different: sodium laureth sulfate (which is a detergent) in toothpaste dulls sweet receptors and breaks up phospholipids (fats) that normally block bitter receptors.
posted by oneirodynia at 11:22 AM on October 14, 2019