Bitter: The forgotten flavor should be part of cooking groove

Consider roasting apple slices with Brussels sprouts to mix the sweet with the bitter. (stock.adobe.com)

As a flavor, bitter often gets a bad rap. A taste to grimace at instead of crave.

While we historically have avoided bitter flavors in favor of all things fatty, salty and sugary, foods like arugula, frisée and rapini with their bitter edges increasingly are colonizing restaurant menus and the vegetable aisle of supermarkets.