Seriously,
I keep on hearing these stories that there’s only a handful of people on earth with the secret formula to Coke, and they never travel on the same plane together, etc, etc,
etc… But with all the technology we have available to us, I don’t understand why we can’t we figure out, say KFC’s secret blend of 11 herbs and spices, or the formula to Coke? Or can we?
It’s been done. There is a series of cookbooks that do a very good job duplicating everything from KFC original recipe to twinkies. I’ve tried a few, and was very pleased with the results. Look for them on Amazon, or your local bookstore.
Top Secret Recipes
More Top Secret Recipes
Top Secret Restaurant Recipes
Those things can be figured out. The “secret recipes” are mainly kept for marketing purposes.
Exhibit A:
The Recipe Detective
This is a lady that tries to determine the ingredients for “secret” recipes.
Also, I’ve read that with gas chromatography and mass spectrometry you can accurately reproduce most (if not all) perfumes, so the difference between the expensive perfume and its cheap knockoff is only in the packaging and the advertising dollars that go to promote the high-cost brand.
You can find a lot of recipes here: Top Secret Recipes
Yes, I’ve seen these sites before, but they all seem to me to be approximations. I’ve seen a zillion variations on the KFC recipe, and I can cook pretty damned well, and, well, like I said, they’re just approximations. I understand the marketing bit, but the Coke syrup thing is quite serious.
My question is can they deduce “secret” ingredients 100%
accurately? A lady trying to figure those things out, though admirable and well-done, is not the same as scientifically finding out the exact proportions of X, Y, and Z used to create Coke syrup.
Sure, Coke is 99% water. Now you have almost all of the formula.
For more on secret ecipes see William Poundstone’s books
Big Secrets
Bigger Secrets
Biggest Secrets
(I guess he can’t write any more sequels)
Pundstone gives the formulas for Coca Cola, Oysters Rockefeller, Joy Perfume, and the secret filling inside Oreos (don’t read this unless you want to stop eating Oreos, among other things. He does this by a combination of detective work and food analysis, which makes for fascinating reading.
Poundstone’s formula for Coke is pretty much corroborated by the book “For God, Country, and Coca Cola” by Pendergast, who had access to (one of the) formulas for Coke.
Purely an interjection, but it’s a guy who’s decoding the secret recipes in TSR. That said, some recipes haven’t been duplicated well for the home cook. Close…but not the same.
A good lab could analyze any recipe going, but the issue is why bother? The formula for coke syrup is patented, and you could’t make it at home anyway, so what’s the diff?
The famed “secret ingredients” are mostly hype and promotion. Most of the unduplicated recipes owe more to equipment not available to the home cook. F’rexample, no one has been able to duplicate KFC exactly; a dubious enterprise to start with, IMO. Same w/ the “blooming onion” appetizer. The trick isn’t so much in the ingredients as in the tools they have to start with. Same reason frozen french fries and assorted spuds are common commercially, but are rarely successful at home.
Sorry, rambling answer but FWIW…
Veb
Okay, CalMeacham, I’ll bite. What’s the dealio with Oreo?
You can’t patent scents, so you’ll find these on the market. But for about every other trade “secret” you’ll be violating intellectual property laws.
What this about coke being patented, if that was so you’d be able to see the entire recipie in the patent and the mystery would die.
I’m not in any way interested in duplicating KFC at home. I can make much better fried chicken than that, anyhow. I was just curious whether the technology exists.
So then if Coke is not patented, what are the legal ramification of me “aquiring” the recipe and then, say,
making a minor variation like adding vanilla (remember Vanilla cokes at soda shops? Mmm…) I assumed there’s some legality preventing some eterprising entrepreneur from doing this.
And, yeah, what IS inside those Oreos? The public deserves the right to know!
Lard and sugar. Delicious!
There’s more to a recipe than just knowing what the ingredients are. From the standpoint of ingredients only, there’s no difference between a bagel and a waffle. You need to know what the proportions are, what order they were added, and how they were cooked, as well.
I used to work at Kentucky Fried Chicken, and if anybody’s interested, the reason the regular recipe’s so different from the extra-crispy is that it’s deep-fried under pressure, like a pressure cooker. I have no idea why the pressure cooker changes the texture and juiciness, but it does. The extra-crispy is just plain deep-fried like Hardee’s and everybody else’s chicken.
These have been covered through the years in other threads.
Snopes seems to be temporarily unavailable so I can’t get you the patent number, but Col. Sanders did patent his KFC method by huge pressure cooker. Wm. Poundstone’s analysis couldn’t find 11 secret herbs and spices in the breading. At the time of his analysis the company had backed off from advertising the “secret.” I’m beginning to see that advertising return lately, so mebbe the company put 'em back.
Oreos used to contain lard. This changed about a decade ago when the company decided to expand their potential audience by offering a product that could be marked Kosher.
As Arnold pointed out these “secret” recipes have more to do with marketing than with rocket science.
Thats right, Crisco & powdered sugar =Oreo cream. Uck.Same stuff really as that white cake frosting you see everywhere.
go to http://www.topsecretrecipes.com to find all your recipe needs.
Maybe it’s purely my imagination, but I could swear that Coke in Israel tastes different (worse) compared to the British variety that I am used to. Something in the water, perhaps?
You guys got it right – Oreos used to POSSIBLY contain lard or beef fat mixed with sugar and flavoring. I wouldn’t be surprised if this changed recently, but it would still be changed to some ariety of fat mixed with sugar and flavoring (just vegetable fat) The “creme” filling in Twinkies, Yankee Doodles, Yodels, et nauseum is basically the same thing (according to Poundstone), but with more fat and less sugar. Yum! (I should add that I still eat some of this occasionally.)
As for the different flavors of Coke – this might be water (I remember drinking Coke in a town which had a high sulphur content in the water. The local ice cubes were filled with it, and the Cokes tasted AWFUL.)or it might be slightly different formulations. Coke tries to be consistent, but the recipe that “For God, Country, anf Coca Cola” relied on for the Coke frmula was apparenty a slight variation used in Russia. In addition, according to Poundstone, different places use corn sugar and others use sucrose. That can make a big difference.
A pox upon Nabisco! They DID change Oreos! I had to go out and buy a package of Magic Dunkers just to check (scientific research, you know), and it says right there, “sugar, enriched flour, partially hydrogenated soybean oil, cocoa, high fructose corn syrup, corn flour, whey, baking soda, cornstarch, salt, soy lecithin, maltodextrin, vanillin, chocolate, artificial color.”
Well, I am disappointed. Life is no longer worth living.
Might as well eat Kroger Assortment Sandwich Cookies.