Strawberries Taste 10x Sweeter When Paired With This Spice

Without adding any sugar, you can make a bowl of strawberries taste just that little bit sweeter by pairing it with something else — a pinch of cinnamon. Now, there is no science to suggest that cinnamon quite literally makes strawberries ten times sweeter, but the headline here is alluding to a much more interesting sensory illusion that involves both our mouths and our noses. 

Our brains actually combine information from both the sense of taste and smell when deciding on a food's flavor, and research has found that certain aromas can increase perceived sweetness. Interestingly, cinnamon is one of the spices whose aroma people tend to associate with sugar, and the more a food is perceived to smell sweet, the more it can enhance the perceived sweetness of how the food tastes. Additionally, cinnamon contains a flavor compound called cinnamaldehyde which can activate the sweet taste receptor in your mouth, enhancing the overall perceived sweetness of the spice.

Strawberries too already have a flavor that depends heavily on aroma (in that we often use our noses to find the sweetest and ripest strawberries at the store). So, adding a warm spice like cinnamon may have the ability shift that balance even further toward sweetness in our brains, without actually changing the amount of sugar on the fruit itself.

Now that we've gotten the science part out the way, the actual implementation of this trick is incredibly simple. You just need to give some sliced or whole strawberries a light dusting of ground cinammon and see for yourself how the warm and earthy notes balance out the fruit's bright acidity, making it taste so much sweeter. A little is a lot here — you can always add more cinnamon if you like, but adding too much can quickly overpower the berries. For a more heightened sweet upgrade, you could even combine ground cinnamon and sugar together before dusting that onto your berries. 

Beyond a fruit snack platter, this combination can be implemented across a whole host of baked goods — imagine sweet and juicy berry-stuffed cinnamon rolls. Or, combine strawberry and cinnamon inside pancakes, muffins, and tortes. People also stir cinnamon into roasted strawberries to use as a tasty and healthy oatmeal topper to have on hand for busy mornings.

So if you're looking to make your fresh fruit taste even sweeter, with or without reaching for any extra sugar, this is a useful little sensory experiment. The strawberries themselves won't change, but you're basically making your brain perceive a little more sweetness.