We try a Shine Muscat experiment that method claim lets Japan’s most delicious grapes shine in a different way.

Shine Muscats don’t really need to be any tastier than they already are. The extra-sweet grapes are among Japan’s most highly prized fruits, and with them in season right now, fans are, quite literally, eating well these days.

Of course, if someone were to figure out a way to make Shine Muscat grapes taste even better, we’d be happy to give it a try, even if it sounded kind of crazy. That’s what we recently did when we tried pickling some Shine Muscats in traditional nukadoko (fermented rice bran), and sure enough, it made their sweetness even more intensely concentrated. The results were so good, in fact, that we were planning to pickle all the rest of our Shine Muscats too, but at the last second, we set some aside for another experiment.

See, we’d also heard rumors that you can enhance your Shine Muscats with carbonated water. We’re not talking about a brief dip in a glass of soda water, either. Japanese foodies who pioneered this technique say you’ve got to let the grapes soak for a long time before you bite into them.

We were curious to try this food hack for ourselves, and the required materials/equipment make for a short list. All you need are Shine Muscat grapes, carbonated water, and a jar with a sealable lid.

Put the grapes into the jar…

…pour in enough soda water to cover them…

…then close the lid tight and let the jar sit in your refrigerator for anywhere between 12 hours and two days.

Shine Muscats are premium-priced fruit, so in the interest of not wasting any for half-effort experimentation, we were patient and held out for the full two days of soaking. When we finally took the jar back out of the fridge and opened it up, all of the carbonation had vanished from the water.

▼ Not a bubble to be seen or a fizz to be heard

We removed a grape from the jar, and set it on a place next to a control-group Shine Muscat that we hadn’t done any sort of treatment to. As you can see in the photo below, the two-day carbonated bath hadn’t done anything to change the grape’s outward appearance.

▼ Shine Muscat soaked in carbonated water for two days (left) and regulae Shine Muscat

Slicing each grape open to look at its cross section, we observed no changes to the carbonated Shine Muscat’s inner beauty either.

The rumors hadn’t said that this experiment would do anything to make the grapes look better, though. The soaking process is supposed to make the Shine Muscats more delicious, so does it? Yes and no, which might sound like faint praise, but we actually were totally satisfied.

As far as we could tell, soaking the grapes in soda water doesn’t change their flavor itself. What it does do, though, is transfer the bubbly quality into the outer layer of the Shine Muscat. Bite into one, and you’re rewarded with a burst of carbonated popping. With the Shine Muscat sweetness still fully present, it’s an incredibly refreshing combination of fun fruity fizziness.

With how simple these are to make, it’d be a snap to whip up a batch of carbonated Shine Muscats either to take to a party or to enjoy as luxurious at-home snacks for yourself. Note, though, that you’ll want to make sure to use a jar where the lid can be shut tightly, since if there’s excess slack in the seal the carbonation is going to escape into the air instead of finding a new home in your grapes.

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