Why does adding sugar to sour things cause them not to be sour?
This is one of those things which I've always thought to be obvious and never really noticed as strange.
"Obviously", if you add sugar to something sour, it makes something sweet. Take for instance Bramley apples in apple crumble, or lemons in lemonade. This is just something that people know!
But if you add sugar to something bitter (coffee, say) it doesn't stop tasting bitter! It just tastes like sweet coffee.
Any explanations?
Best Answer
Sugar does not cause sour food to be any less acidic. The difference is purely one of perception; we are wired by evolution to prefer sweet tastes and tend to perceive less of other tastes when a high sugar concentration is present.
Sugar does not ionize - it is not basic or acidic. Acidity itself is a chemical property, and only a base (such as baking soda or trisodium citrate) can actually neutralize it. Two other compounds - miraculin and curculin - actually alter our mouth chemistry and really do cause sour foods to taste sweet, without actually sweetening the food itself. But plain sugar does nothing at all - there is no chemical reaction happening. It's just masking other tastes, not neutralizing them.
The reason sugar doesn't mask bitterness as effectively as sourness is that sweet and sour have roughly similar taste thresholds, while most humans are extremely sensitive to bitter tastes. We can detect quinine (the reference solute for bitterness) in solution at 0.5 ppm, whereas sucrose isn't normally detectable at levels below 5000 ppm. The amount of sugar needed to mask a significant bitter taste is simply not practical.
If you want to neutralize a bitter taste, use salt instead.
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Quick Answer about "Why does adding sugar to sour things cause them not to be sour?"
Sugar does not cause sour food to be any less acidic. The difference is purely one of perception; we are wired by evolution to prefer sweet tastes and tend to perceive less of other tastes when a high sugar concentration is present. Sugar does not ionize - it is not basic or acidic.Does sugar reduce sourness?
In general, equal sugar molarities and weights did not effect equivalent suppression. Instead, the perceived intensity of the sugars appeared to suppress sourness more systematically, implying that dominantly central neural mechanisms underlie suppression.Does sweet cancel sour?
Sweet flavors will mellow out sour flavors to make them more palatable, which is why they might be considered opposites. Similarly, salt and sweet will suppress bitter flavors, which is why I prefer my bad coffee to be sweet and why you can add a bit of salt to bad coffee to make it taste better.How does sugar turn sour?
No, sugar will never turn sour after long cooking, no matter how long you cook it. This must be some myth. If you take your sugar beyond caramel and into a burned stage, it can become acrid with a faintly sour taste. But this cannot happen as long as there is any moisture in your food.Why You Should Be Sour On Sugar
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Answer 2
There is no chemical reaction taking place when you add sugar to coffee, so the sweetness of the sugar and the bitterness of the coffee are both preserved. You can try to achieve a balance between different tastes, but in most instances you aren't altering the chemical compounds that we detect with our taste buds. The coffee, though sweetened, doesn't stop tasting bitter because humans detect different tastes by using different receptors, so we can taste multiple things simultaneously.
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