It seems like General Mills, or whoever is responsible for the culinary monstrosity that is the Pop Tart, will consider any flavor, however bizarre - a current hit appears to be “chocolate chip cookie dough,” and in the past I’ve seen “s’mores” flavor.
And of course, regular fruit flavors abound - apple, cherry, blueberry, raspberry.
I can see why some fruits would not be candidates for a Pop Tart flavor - pears are too bland, citrus too tart (although “lemon meringue” sounds good in the unlikely event that I as an adult were ever to choose a Pop Tart flavor).
But bananas don’t suffer from any of those drawbacks, so why no banana-flavored Pop Tart? Doesn’t the American processed-food-eating public LIKE banana flavored stuff? That seems unlikely. Can food scientists not figure out how to create a stable banana-flavored filling? That also seems unlikely, given how low the standards are.
Pop Tarts are, in essence, a variation of pie. By their nature, they lend themselves to a typical fruit pie (list of flavors mentioned above) but not to a cream pie. Somewhere along the way, the world determined that some flavors - e.g. orange, lemon, banana - don’t work as typical fruit pies. They may work as cream pies, but that doesn’t fly in a toaster. You want banana, get a cream pie. Don’t toast it.
So apparently I’m not the only one who thinks so. As a little bit of a hijack, does anybody know why we can’t seem to make an artificial banana flavour that actually tastes like bananas?
Artificial banana flavor is horrid. I imagine we don’t have banana poptarts for the same reason we don’t have banana jam. It would be like baby food in a crust. :blech:
I just don’t think Americans like banana flavoring all that much. I had to buy banana-flavored Nesquik online overseas and have it imported because it was discontinued in the US due to poor sales. Plus, I really can’t imagine a warm, toasted, banana-flavored Pop Tart as being all that good…
We have banana flavored jam here. I also have a number of recipes for it in my various cookbooks, some of which focus on island and Pacific cuisine. Banana jam is quite good (if you like sweet things), and needs no artificial flavors.
Of course, the bananas here are much more flavorful than the tasteless blobs sold in the US, so maybe the problem is less about whether a banana pop tart could possibly be good and more about whether there’d be any hope of marketing it successfully. (Though I still find that hard to believe - kids like bananas and they are the target market for Pop Tarts.)
Regarding artificial banana flavor, there was a SDMB thread on the subject of concentrated fruit flavorings a while ago, in which it was pointed out that most concentrated fruit flavorings that people dislike are in fact real - molecularly indistinguishable from the original product - and just reflect the fact that a really concentrated banana (or other) taste is yucky, not that it isn’t the true taste of a banana. Most likely, it is.
Sometimes it is and sometimes it isn’t. I believe that in the case of banana ester the flavor is identical, but flavor makes only a small overall contribution to “The Banana Experience”, if you will. It’s also about texture, sweetness, appearance, freshness, etc. These can’t be distilled down in a chemical formula, so banana-flavored anything just isn’t going to be as satisfying unless it’s in some other combination that compliments the flavor or supplies those missing elements of satisfaction.
Not exactly true. Banana plants are herbaceous, meaning that they have green fleshy stems rather than wood ones. In fact, they’re the world’s largest herbaceous plants, if Wikipedia is to be believed. So it’s correct to say that the banana plant is not a tree, it’s an herb. But it’s incorrect to say that bananas themselves aren’t fruit.
No, I’m pretty sure they taste like mango.