Experiment Gallery
Daily Notes
Someone online claims artichoke makes water taste sweet, and blame a protein although they also say the effect survives cooking.
I bought an artichoke but even chewing on the raw stem for a while I don't really notice the effect.
I chopped up some stem and extracted with 70% ethanol and gentle heat, with a pinch of citric acid.
Running a TLC place with ethyl acetate gave a pink smudge for the chlorophyll, re-running with 70:20:8:2 EA: Ethanol : water : vinegar gave some blue-fluorescing smudges for (presumably) various phenolics, the front-runner of which also quenches UVC and is a likely candidate for chlorogenic acid, which the lit claims is present in large quantities in the stems of some cultivars and blames for the sweetening effect (specifically, it taste sweet when it is washed away). Tasting various concentrated versions of the extract, both plain and neutralized, didn't really get me much sweetness I could notice 🤷 I'll try cooked artichoke tomorrow, although my general opinion of this plant matches my feelings on this experiment: too much work for ~no gain :)
Update: tried cooked, various other extractions: no dice. Processed out some fairly pure white compound that I'm hopeful was the chlorogenic acid, tasted about as described, DID seem to maybe make my coffee a little less bitter but hard to taste with confidence :) Only positive of this was having something to dip in my extra satay sauce.