Tea after fruit

I think Malic acid reacts poorly with water, specifically.  I can’t drink plain water after an apple without it going off.

I have the same experience! I think the worst is melon. 

However, adding lemon to tea is good. Adding orange peel too. Isn’t Earl Grey a tea flavored with some kind of citrous fruit peel? So how come putting some fruit into tea is good, but drinking tea after the fruit is no good? 

Bergamot orange makes Earl Grey.

I can assure you that eating citrus fruit orange, grapefruit etc before tea would most certainly make the tea taste terrible. Same for melon, apple, grapes and strawberries.

I think that really is an interesting question. Eating most other food before tea would not do that. Some even make the tea taste better, and tea making the food better.

 I think this really is a very interesting question, too. Adding lemon into tea is very different from drinking tea after eating lemon, that I can say because of a lot my own experience. Lemon tea is popular in my home Hong Kong, and I love eating lemon with skin just for the extreme taste excitement. I would not drink tea afterwards  :-&

As tea, the fruit is rich in tannins and simple catechins (collectively known as polyphenols) that make proteins in saliva to precipitate and stick on your mouth and tongue (this results in astringency: the sensation of friction of the tongue to the walls of the mouth, not to confound with bitterness). They are also less water-soluble than they were after meeting those fruit polyphenols. Also the proteins involved in taste perception are affected. This explains why it takes a while for the saliva to solubilize fruit polyphenols and detouch them from your taste receptors, and why you can taste its peculiar astringency for such a long time. During this time, taste receptors in your mouth are “busy” and cannot sense properly the texture of your White Peony.

😡 What an answer! This explains a lot. Thank you!

@ Alex, this is such a great explanation made simple! Remember you asking me to write about taste in tea? I think it seems like you are a great candidate for it yourself!

Thank you Leo! You know, I’m always glad to write about tea, especially from a more technical point of view! 🙂

However, tea after raisins or dried figs and apricots is good. Does this mean the polyphenols in the fruits are gone when dried?

It does not depend on the content of water in the food: the fruit is dried to slow down its natural process of degradation, but the content of nutrients and polyphenols is hardly altered during drying. What matters is the quality and the quantity of polyphenols among different fruits. As example, unripe fruits is rich in tannins, a subclass of polyphenols that has the greatest ability to make proteins to precipitate. Then, during ripening, tannins are degraded and that fruit becomes more sweet and less astringent. In fact, ripe and mellow fruit is more compatible with tea. Anyway, comparing two ripened fruits on their capacity to hide the texture of a tea is still possible because of their different qualities and mixtures of polyphenols contained.

Thank you for quick response! Perhaps I am only in the fringes of the internet culture that I don’t think I can ever do that. If what you said is true than it would mean eating a ripened grape compared to a raisin I get the same amount of tannins in my tongue. However, drinking tea after a grape is totally different from after a raisin. Don’t you think that is very interesting? 

Raisins are made using a particular kind of grape, richer in sugars and without seeds. It is like selecting a cultivar of tea plants. They are two different products 🙂

Also consider that a dryed fruit is more concentrated in substances and that they are in a solid form. In fresh fruits, substances are just dissolved in water. This makes a big difference when you put these foods on your tongue: solid ones stick physically in your mounth and it takes more time to be solubilized and swallowed. The persistance in this case can be given by any substance, and I think the different experience you had with dried and fresh fruits is more concerning sugars instead of polyphenols. If you try to swallow sugar in crystals and sugar just dissolved in water, for sure you would feel the difference in terms of persistance and its intensity.

That’s right! Those dried fruits that are not sulphated are so much darker and the kind of sweetness is totally different from the fresh ones. The taste has not just intensified but changed. I enjoy so much more dried ones these days perhaps because I am old and feel that the fresh ones, even if not stored in the fridge, are too cold for me. Dried fruits, particularly those old fashion style that are sun-dried and dark color, feel so much warmer and comfortable to the stomach.

@Betty

Yes. As I’ve written before, changing the starting material also changes the chemical composition of the final product, as more or less sugars, different qualieties of sugars… And the same applies on polyphenols. Food post-treatment is even much more important if you want to assess differences among apparently similar foods. So, consider the maturing process (dried fruits are intended to be conserved, not consumed fresh, and they change) or addition of other substances (flavors, sweeteners, preservatives, etc.)

Actually the discussion becomes very complex if we try to investigate on the taste of foods and its relation with food processing. I’m not going into details here, but I just want to say that in the case of dried fruit, polysaccarides (especially pectins in fruit) form a kind of mesh in which other substances get trapped. This acts as a mask for some flavors or simply makes those flavors to dissolve slower and differently among them, in a way that we can sense them in different instants during tasting, thus intriguing even more the complexity of that food.