I know "acidic food" is described as "sour" but what do we call food that is "alkaline"?
Flavor – name for the taste coming from alkaline food
flavorlanguage
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Best Answer
The question intrigued me, mostly because I was under the impression that foods just varied in the degree of acidity, and we don't eat alkali materials. So looking up on a couple of charts found randomly on the internet, ...
Approximate pH of Foods and Food products
pH Values of Common Foods and Ingredients
... and keeping in mind Mr. Janowski's statement from 10th grade that water has pH 7, and anything higher than that is a "base", I find that yes, we do eat alkali foods [he also taught that "alkali" was a fancy word for "base"], but not very many. Some of the ones that jumped out at me were:
corn, ripe olives, tofu, birds nest soup[??], clams, coconut, conch (pH of 7.52-8.40!!), graham crackers, grass jelly[??], hominy, lobster, soda crackers, cooked spinach. (Some of those were listed with a range of pH values extending from just below 7 to just above 7). So what taste do they have in common? In fact what do they have in common at all? Many have either been heavily processed maybe with alkaline chemicals (ripe olives, tofu, hominy), or come from the sea (conch, lobster, clams). Those examples seem to mostly have a salty component to their flavor. As for the land-origin, naturally occuring examples, i.e. corn and coconut, they aren't salty, and they don't seem to have any taste in common to each other or those other basic foods.
So my (disappointing) answer is, I don't think you can taste the "basic" quality itself, except that many foods which are basic are often salty because of processing or being borne of sea water (pH 8.1 - 8.2 per internet).