I bought an off-brand carbonated peach soda. I wasn’t expecting much, and it didn’t taste like much. Then, the small print on the front caught my eye “peach and grapefruit natural flavor”. This got me wondering. If the ingredients contain no natural juice(s), then where does “natural flavor” come from? Thin air?
I’m hoping the SDopers may know how one captures “natural flavor” without a conduit, such as the juice of the fruit? For one, is there a peach zest, I WAG?
It seems plausible (although maybe not economical) to run some form of solvent through a peach slurry then boil off the solvent. I’ve seen some neat things done with supercritical CO2 and hops, for instance, leaving a highly concentrated flavoring agent.
Natural flavor extracts from fruit or juice.
My knowledge is about vanilla. Check out the grocery store baking products section. You’ll see a bottle of “Artificial Vanilla Flavoring” for a couple bucks. Right next to it, you’ll find a bottle of Natural Vanilla Flavoring" for three or four times as much.
And if you care about the final product, you’ll buy the expensive one.
The vanilla flower is a type of orchid. The flower produces a seed pod, like a very long, skinny string bean, black in color. The pod is split and soaked in alcohol. That’s “Natural Vanilla Flavoring.” True connoisseur can tell the difference between Indonesian vanilla, Mexican vanilla and Madagascar vanilla.
Artificial vanilla flavoring (vanillin) is a by-product of the waste produced in paper production. If you’ve ever been downwind of a paper mill (thank you, Tacoma, WA!), you would be less impressed with vanillin.
To quote Wikipedia:
Natural flavor “Flavoring substances obtained from plant or animal raw materials, by physical, microbiological or enzymatic processes.”
Artificial flavor “These are typically produced by fractional distillation and additional chemical manipulation of naturally sourced chemicals, crude oil or coal tar.”
Yum! Yum!
~VOW
The critical part is this: Natural flavors are obtained from the source materials by simpler processes. Artificial flavors are obtained by major chemical manipulation.
In other words: The distinction lies in how complicated the technology was that produced it. Very complicated technology makes a flavor that we describe as “artificial”. If the technology is not so complicated, the resulting product’s flavor is called “natural”.
Did anyone notice what’s missing from the above?
Natural peach flavor does NOT have to come from peaches! It can come from ANYTHING, provided that it tastes like a peach. Or provided that we can extract something from it that tastes like a peach, and do it without messing up its chemistry too badly. If we cross the line, it will be called an artificial flavor.
Costco! Cheap real vanilla, and cheap vanilla beans, for several times less than the grocery store.
Yep. Your natural strawberry flavoring can be from a bacterial slurry.
Unrelated, but also note than many juices contain “pear juice” high up in the ingredients. It can still be called juice, but is cut with the cheaper stuff.
And if you see something that’s obviously super sweet, but is labeled “NO SUGAR ADDED”, it’s probably because what they added wasn’t sugar, it was grape juice. As if it’s a big difference to your metabolism.
Marketing. :eek: Gotta love it. :mad:
Another natural flavor is lemongrass. You see, lemon juice can be expensive, and affected by market demands. And it adds acidity, maybe affecting the food’s formulation. But lemongrass adds lemon flavor, without the acidity, and its produced in tropical countries where the climate is more dependable. So it gets used, instead of lemon juice.
How does this address the peach flavor? I don’t know, I’m not a flavors formulation chemist. This is a real discipline, and the work they do is certainly a trade secret for the companies involved. But let me try to guess – lets look at what we can find, that’s cheap:
Consider cling peaches in a can, they’re skinless, so where do the skins go? They may be solvent extracted for “peachyness.” Maybe nectarines are over produced some years relative to demand, an extract of them, mixed with “peach flavor” to fool the average person’s taste buds. Maybe a small amount of plum puree, adds extra “peachyness” to the mix of peach extract and nectarine flavor. Maybe a 1:10000 dilution of almond oil, added to the mix enhances peach flavor. I just pulled that out of nowhere – the almond is a related plant, maybe the flavor, in vanishing small amount, triggers the “peach flavor” center of the brain subliminally. Look at the ingredients in cola flavors, do you taste the wintergreen oil?
In vanishingly small amounts, mixed with other flavors, very strange chemicals can enhance flavor. I’d heard that artificial chocolate flavor contains the chemical skatole. Go look that one up.
There is a great article I once read about the flavoring industry in which someone stated that a “natural flavor” is simply a compound that could be synthesized with out-of-date technology. Basically, if you make your flavor chemicals using 19th century techniques they are “natural,” but if you use 20th century techniques they “artificial.” Sometimes they end up being chemically identical.
A bit of googling found me the article: Why McDonald’s Fries Taste So Good
As a (former) chemist, I have to take issue with this. Yes, the artificial vanilla flavouring may have less subtlety than natural vanilla extract, but that is because it is less pure than the natural one. Real vanilla extract will likely have many other chemicals in it other than the vanillin, which will affect the flavour and give it the characteristics you describe, whereas artificial vanillin will be much purer because it has been synthesised under controlled conditions.
But I guarantee you that each artifically-produced vanillin molecule is absolutely identical to a naturally-sourced one. So what if it was produced with wood pulp as a source material - there’s no wood pulp in the finished product so trying to put people off by mentioning paper-mill waste is disingenuous.
Colophon is correct.
claiming that vanillin is paper mill waste is only because lignin (which the vanillin comes from) is not desired to have in paper. lignin is a by-product of making paper and gets used to make many things. using something as a by-product keeps it from being truly waste.
brewer’s yeast is nutritious thing to eat. you could call it wine or brewing waste with that point of view. i would call it a useful healthy by-product.