A Japanese café started serving up berries that make sour desserts taste sweet on Tuesday, offering dieters the chance to indulge in snacks without piling on the calories.
The desserts at the Miracle Fruits Café in Tokyo contain almost no sugar and are unbearably sour, but come with a berry from the Synsepalum dulcificum plant — also known as miracle fruit — that makes the sour desserts sweet to the taste, according to Namco, which runs the café.
”You could eat a whole lemon and it would taste sweet,” Namco spokesperson Yuko Tsukui said of the berries, which accompany desserts on the café’s menu — all of which have less than 100 calories, or one-fifth that of normal cakes and puddings.
The berry’s juices affect the tongue for about 30 minutes to an hour and can be washed away with hot tea or water, Tsukui said.
Found in West Africa, miracle berries contain the protein miraculin, which stimulates the tongue’s taste buds and makes sour food and drinks taste sweet.
Though discovered centuries ago, miracle berries have not been widely marketed because they are easily perishable. But a Japanese supplier recently developed a way to freeze-dry the fruit, allowing for a stable supply of the berries, Tsukui said.
The café’s desserts sell for about 800 yen ($6,70), plus an additional 250 yen ($2,10) for a miracle berry. — Sapa-AP