The Complete Guide to Miracle Berries

Miracle berries (sometimes called miracle fruit) make sour foods taste sweet. Just one berry will give you the effect for 30 minutes to an hour and allow you to experience food in a completely new way!

Get everything you need to know about this magical fruit – from where to buy it to the best foods to try with it.

What are Miracle Berries?

Miracle berries are small red berries that contain a protein called miraculin.

When taste buds are exposed to miraculin, normally sour-tasting foods such as lemons and limes are perceived as tasting sweet.

How are Miracle Berries Sold?

Miracle fruit is sold in two main formats:

1. Fresh berries
2. Miraculin tablets (also known as taste tripping pills)

They both work equally well. The tablets have the advantage of costing MUCH less than the fresh fruit. But, I love the experience of eating the actual berries.

Where to Buy Miracle Berries and Taste Tripping Pills

Box of miracle fruit from Ethan’s Garden (photo via Amazon)

It’s not easy to find miracle berries or miraculin tablets at most grocery stores, but you can find both on Amazon.

• Fresh miracle berries from Ethan’s Garden [paid link] ($49.99 for 15 berries)
• Miracle fruit tablets from mberry [paid link] ($17.99 for 10 tablets)

How to Eat Miracle Fruit

If you are using the berries, there is a very specific way to eat them.

1. Before putting the miracle fruit in your mouth, cleanse your palate with a tall glass of water.
2. The miracle fruit needs to coat your mouth in order to have an effect, so don’t just quickly swallow it down. You should hold it in your mouth and swoosh it around for a little bit.
3. Then, bite into it and make sure the juices coat your whole mouth.
4. Wait a few minutes for the berry to take full effect.

Don’t eat the pit.

Some claim that the effects of the berry do not occur in parts of their mouth that aren’t coated. I did not personally experience that.

What Does Miracle Fruit Taste Like?

The surprising (at least to me) thing about eating miracle fruit is that it tastes really good. It’s a tangy berry that tastes sort of like a sweetened cranberry.

When to Try Miracle Berries

Some people like to serve miracle fruit at flavor tripping parties where they gather with friends to have a new taste experience.

Others use the taste tripping pills as diet pills as a way to cut back on sugar while still experiencing sweet flavors.

What to Eat with Miracle Berries

The menu at a flavor tripping party should consist of foods that are very sour – foods that, without the berries or pills, would give you the same squniched up faces as my friends Brad and Christina have in the photo above.

Make sure to taste all of the sour foods offered before you start flavor tripping so that you can compare what they taste like before and after you’ve tried the miracle fruit.

Here are some foods we served with miracle berries at a flavor tripping party (along with our thoughts):

• Lemons and limes – Some said that the lemons tasted like lemonade. I didn’t find them to be overly sweet, but the sour taste was definitely cut and the natural sugar in the lemon seemed to come out much stronger. Sucking on a lemon or a lime was quite a pleasant experience.
• Grapefruits – My absolute favorite thing to eat with the miracle fruit is grapefruit. I am not typically a huge grapefruit fan and I LOVED it! I could not stop eating it!
• Sour candy – Sour candies were insanely sweet with the miracle fruit – too sweet!

• Blue Cheese – It wasn’t sour enough to notice any big difference.
• Chocolate (sure, it’s not sour to start with, but we were curious) – The chocolate tasted much worse after miracle fruit. Its finer flavors were lost and you could only taste the sweetness.
• Olives – My friend Brad and I both dislike olives. Brad was really hoping that olives would taste much better under the influence of the miracle fruit. Nope; they were still olives.
• Kombucha – Really sour kombucha tastes super sweet with the miracle berries.
• Guinness – We’d heard that Guinness tasted like a chocolate milkshake after eating miracle fruit. Not so. It was definitely less bitter, but it did not reach milkshake status.

• Sour cupcakes with goat cheese frosting – I baked some cupcakes with no sugar at all in them and spread goat cheese on them as the frosting. They were actually good with miracle fruit and the goat cheese frosting tasted like buttercream!

Side Effects of Miracle Fruit

I don’t know of any side effects of miracle fruit. However, the flavor tripping experience can be a bit much for some.

The part of it that I don’t like is that it makes my saliva sweet. My mouth felt like it was permanently sucking on a candy. I was glad when the effects wore off, but I was also glad to have tried miracle berries!