Questionable Tastes

I don’t think that orange-flavored yogurt should be a thing but it is. It just seems so… unlikely. It seems like it just shouldn’t work and yet, there it is on store shelves. People must be buying it. (Maybe they’re somehow not eating it. Or maybe it’s a once-in-a-lifetime purchase, or they forget that they don’t like it and they mistakenly buy it again?)

I’m reluctant to try it, but I’m a little curious now.

I mean, yogurt is slightly acidic due to the culture used to make it and oranges are acidic, so it’s not like it’s combining two completely different flavor elements. Besides, other citrus-flavored yogurts, like lemon and lime seem like they would taste good. And orange crème brûlée is extremely tasty, so it’s not that orange flavors can’t be paired with dairy. Perhaps I’m just skeptical because the fruit flavorings that get used in foods are usually grotesque caricatures of real fruit flavors, e.g. grape or orange-flavored soda or watermelon-flavored anything. There is skill in selecting the right ingredients and approach to combining flavors in food.

Some things truly require too much effort to combine. Chocolate and bacon don’t really go together, for example, even though I wish they did. (Vosges makes the only bacon chocolate bar that works.) The salty/sweet combination works in many other combinations: salted caramels, chocolate-covered pretzels or even chocolate-covered potato chips. The saltiness of bacon combines brilliantly with the sweetness of maple syrup. (Hello, bacon waffles!) But chocolate is more complicated than syrup. In my opinion, it’s that the particular kind of savoriness (“umami”, if we’re being precise) of bacon is hard to blend with the rich and complex cocoa flavor of chocolate.

Just think of what might have been: chocolate-covered, bacon-wrapped espresso beans! The world came within a hair’s breadth of having the ultimate on-the-go breakfast snack.

Chocolate and orange might also initially seem to clash in a similar way, but they actually pair quite nicely. And curiously—to return to the citrus theme—lemon does not seem at all correct as a compliment to chocolate. It just doesn’t really work the same way. Pineapple is only slightly better: meh…

But the way that flavor combinations sound can never quite capture the experience of how they taste: like strawberry and basil (quite good), or pineapple and mint (astonishingly good). There is, perhaps, simply too much complexity for my imagination to grasp at once. Some things need to be tried to be believed, or even just comprehended; after all, my tongue can taste much more than it can articulate.

Maybe I’ll try orange yogurt sometime, if only to understand why it doesn’t taste good to me. Maybe I’ll be surprised.