I hate cilantro!

You don't like food, do you?

I mean, I hate raisins, but I'm learning to get over it. I don't particularly care for cooked sweet peppers but I'll eat them. I get my finickyness out of my system by being a vegetarian.

Oh wait, I just remembered. LICORICE!!! UGH! UGH! WASH MY MOUTH OUT WITH SOAP! YUCK!!!

(BTW, you have eaten both tofu and cilantro in my cooking before without complaining. Or, ooh, err, were you just being polite?)

try Piquillo peppers though - nummmest of nums

Kate and her cooking of cilantro and tofu are exempt because she made them for me when I was sick and blasted the snot right outta there. Boooom!

The only thing I will not eat is raisins cooked in savoury dishes (esp curry). Their horrid puffy fatness 'Oh I used to be a grape dontchaknow' really gets my goat.

I like raisins but I wish they'd stay out of my cinnamon buns.

surely that's a complaint....

Things I would not eat when small: egg yolk, bread crusts, mayonnaise, meat fat of any kind, raw carrots (gave me tummyaches), Stouffers Spinach Souffle.

altho, i love olive oil.

I rarely enjoy eating eggs. They have to be REALLY hard scrambled. Mushy eggs are grody. That's right - grody.

stewed tomatoes are icky, but usually big enough to catch with a fork and hurl across the room to the bin. fresh tomatoes on samiches are VERY icky. They make everything all watery. (see also: spinach on pizza - c/d?)

My food hate extends to: onions (raw onions rather, they're great in soup and whatnot), licorice and the spices that make things taste similarly foul, and mushrooms, although I suspect that I actually like mushrooms now and am just being stubborn.

Oh, and fucking caraway seeds.

Ugh! Ugh! Ugh!

I like raw tomatoes, but not on sammiches. I always pick them out and eat them separately if I can't avoid them.

-- El Santo Claus

OTMFM. same goes for green olives. olives in general. ick. i too am fond of olive oil. it's nothing like the real things.

as far as cilantro goes, the more the better. deliciously fragrant herbal treat! chop it finely, mix it in with your sour cream or yogurt and put it on your mexican dishes, etc. it's quite tasty.

Cilantroicallitcoriander is good! You guys are crazy.

I can't really think of any food I don't like. Besides rocket and tofu.

― Roz (Roz)

i don't hate rocket anymore, quite like it even. still working on tofu.

There's a gene which makes coriander taste like soap for some people.

cilantro is the grand puba of all herbs and spices

cilantro porn:
http://fuckyeahcilantro.tumblr.com

Freshly chopped coriander is one of the nicest smells in the world. Chop those stalks! Yummy.

I'm on the anti side. Those little green leaves ruin everything they touch. I can understand why people usually go for the soap comparison but I prefer my brother's description: "It tastes like something you're not supposed to eat, like a weed someone just yanked out of the ground."

"It tastes like something you're not supposed to eat, like a weed someone just yanked out of the ground."

See, this is what I think about parsley, but cilantro, while closely related, is great.

Y'all upthread are a bunch of picky eaters. About the only thing I will refuse to get near ever again, under any circumstances, is menudo. Tripe soup, even when seasoned with all sorts of lovely Mexican spice, is just a BAD idea.

Just bought a big bunch of cilantro. Quesadillas for lunch! Ooooh yeah.

I think all you weirdos need to start your own "I love cilantro" thread. This is a thread about disgust and commiseration, people.

I thought Menudo was that revolving-door boyband that Ricky La Vida Loca was in?

it is also a soup

i'm going to grow cilantro this summer!

when I was a kid, I saw a dead bird on my driveway. My nextdoor neighbours had a garden patch, and the smell of cilantro came toward me. Thinking it was the bird I could smell, I decided that I was smelling rabies. Now I can't eat cilantro because it "tastes like rabies" to me. Stupid cilantro.

Stupid "cilantro"?

hey now

It is coriander.

Try searching small town UK for 3 hours for 'cilantro' (thanks to a US-orientated cookbook) to make a special Chinese curry dish for Mother's Day, before discovering that you ALREADY HAD 3 JARS OF THE DRIED STUFF AT HOME under a different name.

To contribute, I never really saw the appeal of humous.

It's like someone put paper and some olive oil into a blender.

people talk about this alot IRL

If hummus tastes like paper and olive oil yr doin it rong.

It cant be bland! It's full of garlic and cumin and lemon juice!

Now we know why

Yeah, saw that on the other cilantro thread this morning.

“So I began to like cilantro,” he said. “It can still remind me of soap, but it’s not threatening anymore, so that association fades into the background, and I enjoy its other qualities. On the other hand, if I ate cilantro once and never willingly let it pass my lips again, there wouldn’t have been a chance to reshape that perception.”

This palate-retraining is happening to me, thanks to the fantastic tacos at El Pargo (RIP) in Columbus. Nothing on 'em but really good grilled meats, chopped onion, cilantro, squeeze of lime.

It's funny that cilantrophobes associate it with saponacity since it tastes particularly clean to me for some reason, but I've loved it since I first had it.

Thank you, that's zupah-interesting. I don't think I've never known what "bug" smelled like but I can still hate walking past produce sections with giant armfuls of stinky cilantro.

I can't imagine tacos or pozole w/out it.

Laurel, what do you think of coriander?

I don't know, I've never bought or used it myself. I'm sure I've had it in restaurant food at some point, and I don't remember objecting particularly.

Cilantro itself can be reshaped to make it easier to take. A Japanese study published in January suggested that crushing the leaves will give leaf enzymes the chance to gradually convert the aldehydes into other substances with no aroma.

I suspect that coriander (from cilantro seeds) doesn't contain any of the aldehydes that offend you.

I love that we've gone from coriander to ignorance to cilantro via its re-introduction via a foreign cuisine. It reminds me of rocket/arugula.

And, in America at least, mâche/lambs lettuce.

Speaking of arugula, this caught my eye: “Cilantro and arugula I don’t like at all. They’re both green herbs, they have kind of a dead taste to me.” - Julia Child

...because cilantro even makes me wary of parsley, which I otherwise like. If I have cilantro followed by parsley, the latter is more offensive b/c of its similarity to the former. It's like reverse taste-therapy that actually makes me MORE averse.

How do you feel about Italian (leaf) parsley?

M. White, Food Psychotherapist

Sometimes a banana is just a banana!

sometimes people just don't like cilantro

M. White, Food Psychotherapist is more like it.

That's what I was referring to. I like it, grow it, use it, will even sneak into produce aisle under the beady gaze of buckets of wet, bruised cilantro just to help a bunch of flat-leaf parsley defect to my kitchen counter.

I'm curious as to whether her cilantrophic carry-over toward parsley applies more to Italian parsely, which has a texture more similar to cilantro, or the more bitter, stemmier, crunchier normal parsley.

xpost

So, if cilantro didn't have its specific aromatic flavor, you'd otherwise be fine with it?

How about Thai basil?

I recognize that flat-leaf parsley is similar to the demon herb, but parsley alone doesn't trigger enough of a reaction for me to dislike it -- in fact I want the complexity/freshness/tang it adds to a lot of recipes.

Have never cooked w Thai basil, possible I have had it on something but I couldn't say for sure. I chiffonade normal Italian basil for topping home-made Thai soups etc, even tho I know it's not quite right.

Anyway, I remember the first time I ever had cilantro: in the student caf, in college. I asked why someone had topped their lunch w sprigs of parsley and they gave me some to try. Disliked it from the very first.

I am living proof that a palate can be retrained to like cilantro (in moderate quantities and specific circumstances).

Are there different kinds of cilantro, the way there are different kinds of basil? It seems like the cilantro used by Mexican restaurants on tacos is milder than the cilantro served by Vietnamese restaurants with pho.

maybe they use culantro?? some people say papalo is very similar to cilantro, just stronger, but it has a very different taste to me.

maybe this also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnamese_coriander
never noticed that mexican cilantro is milder than elsewhere, i can't really deal with papalo

pretty interesting - study found genetic link to cilantro hatred
http://gizmodo.com/5942551/genetic-proof-that-you-really-do-hate-cilantro
http://arxiv.org/abs/1209.2096

cilantro sucks shit

sorry your genes have made you miss out on awesome cilantro and also made you dumb

not your fault i guess. genes. what can you do.

I lvoe being dumb

Hm. I mildly dislike cilantro and agree it tastes soapy, but I'll eat stuff with a small amount in and would not say I "HATE" it.

Now I do not know if I am a genetic cilantro-hater or not. Both of my parents will happily eat it so I guess I'm not.

Cilantro is gross in Cuban food: it overpowers the stuff.

I don't like it, but sometimes jus a titchy bit in a curry can give it an authentic edge.

Soaking it in water helps if you're eating it raw

The leaves have a different taste from the seeds, with citrus overtones. Many experience an unpleasant "soapy" taste or a rank smell and avoid the leaves.[9][10] The flavours have also been compared to those of the stink bug, and similar chemical groups are involved (aldehydes). -Wikipedia

The chemicals that make up a stink bug’s stink are called aldehydes, and they are different in different species. In low concentrations, the aldehydes have a pleasant odor. Some of the most common aldehydes in the “stink” of a stinkbug are described by chemists like fine wine: “green, pungent, spicy vegetable odor”, “diffusive orange odor with floral topknots” and “green, citrusy, orange”. But stink bugs concentrate these chemicals so much that they become wholly unpleasant, even irritating.

I don't think cilantro tastes like soap, exactly, but I used to describe it as "too green" or "aggressively green."

I've gone from loathing to mild dislike, and in a decent taco, cilantro/onion/hot sauce/squeeze of lime is the right way to go.