I’ve been wondering for a while now if I might have that gene or whether Cilantro is just a herb i dislike. I can stomach dishes with cilantro in them, but it just stings through everything. No matter how little was put in, it tastes to me like somebody over-cilantro’d the dish. I’ve never eaten anything where I thought “Mmmh, yes, there’s a subtle hint of cilantro” - it’s always “Oh, there’s the cilantro, and it’s just too strong”.
But whenever I read about this online, people say that it tastes like soap. It’s been a couple of years since I was toddler enough to just put soap in my mouth. But in my mind, the taste of soap is mostly bitter, with an overwhelming tropical/fruity/citrussy flavor of whatever the producers decided to make the soap smell like. I also imagine it having a really unpleasant texture/mouthfeel. I have no urge to try eating soap, just so I can compare it with the taste of a herb. And I assume that most people with the Cilantro-gene also haven’t made an actual taste-comparison. So hence my question: In what way does anything - but cilantro in particular - taste like soap?
On a related note, I love olive oil but hate olives, because anytime a dish has olives at all, it tastes like there’s too many olives. It’s like the olive takes away the taste from the other ingredients and replaces everything with olive taste.
Cilantro tastes fine to me though.
Hmm, is that olive thing not a universal experience? I always figure the cooks are just too lazy to cut up the olives, which would help a lot.
Well, and what also helps is to combine the olives with lots of different veggies. Don’t just serve an olive-tomato salad, but rather throw in cucumber, bell pepper and garlic as well, along with maybe some beans, a bit of rosemary and thyme.
I guess, the cooks have a hearty salad like that in mind, but then start bargaining whether they could leave out one or two veggies.
And then they never figure out that, no, they cannot. You need a rich base flavour to compete with the olives, but then you want it to be light to balance out how heavy the olives are. Well, and a surefire way to get rich+light is just lots of different veggies.