Hello everyone. I'm a newcomer and this is my first post, so please bear with me.
I'm an American living in Taiwan, and there's something about food here that interests me. There are some restaurants here that specialize in lamb meat, which is an especially fatty kind of meat. The lamb restaurants here tend to serve their lamb with slices of lime, a very acidic fruit. The flavors go really well together. After eating a piece of lamb without any lime, the tongue is overwhelmed with the flavor of fat, but with lime juice the acid nicely balances the flavor of the fat. If you squeeze the lime over the lamb, the flavors are balanced perfectly. But, I find that the flavors are most intense when you eat the lamb without the lime juice, then bite into a slice of lime like you would after taking a shot of tequila.
It occurs to me that the same principle exists the way lamb is prepared in America, with a vinegar-and-mint-sauce. I always assumed it was the mint that went well with the lamb, but I'm starting to suspect that it's really the vinegar, because of the acid content.
Tonight I noticed a similar phenomenon with different ingredients. I was eating a leftover turkey wing from Thanksgiving and drinking cranberry juice. Once again, a fatty meat combined with an acidic liquid. The flavors balance each other perfectly, in the exact same way that lime or vinegar complements lamb.
What's going on here? What is it about acid that balances the flavor of fat?
