Ying Han¹, Zhizhou Zhang^{1, 2,}

Many Chinese medicine soups are very bitter and hard for children to drink. Some direct and simple bitter-masking approaches in daily food and Chinese medicine are always of great need. In this study, a rainbow trout bone soup-based efficient de-bittering method was discovered by serendipity when the authors tried to attenuate the bitterness of the bone soups made from cod and salmon. The bitterness of one of the bitterest daily food, bitter mellon, was completely removed by the trout bone extract. The bitterness of the soups of Coptis chinensis and kuh-seng, two of the extreme bitter Chinese medicine, were also eliminated with high efficiency. Bone soups made of cod and salmon didn’t have de-bittering function. Fatty acids composition analysis was performed with the bone soups made from cod, salmon and trout, and the results clearly demonstrated that the trout soup has much higher concentrations of myristic acid, palmitic acid, stearic acid, cis-9-hexadecenoic acid, and cis-9-octadecenoic acid. The combination of the five pure fatty acids did display the capacity to almost remove the bitterness of all above tested soup materials, either food or Chinese medicine. But other combinations (less than five components) cannot achieve the same level of de-bittering effect.

fatty acids, bitterness, masking, trout, bone soup