Saffron is lovely, but hideously expensive. Why has nobody made a synthetic version of it?
I know there are (so-called) substitutes such as safflower, annato, turmeric - and sometimes, synthetic food colorants are used instead - but none of these is anywhere near a properly adequate substitute for the delicate aroma and flavour of saffron.
However, consider Vanilla - reasonably expensive - and there are synthetic alternatives available that are (although doubtless snorted at by purists) reasonable approximations of the real thing.
So why don’t we have a substitute for real saffron? - I guess it would have to be bought in liquid form and added using a pipette. Is the chemistry too complex to reproduce?
The vanillin molecule is fairly simple and seems to be readily synthesized from easily obtained precursors.
The most important molecule in saffron, picrocrocin, is more complex. Perhaps more important, real saffron contains 150 other compounds that contribute to its taste and flavor. Possibly pure picrocrocin, even if it could be synthesized easily, wouldn’t give the complexity of real saffron.
Even more puzzling: Why no synthetic spices that are totally new, and do not duplicate any existing natural spices, but taste and/or smell really good?
Actually, these do exist. For example: You know the distinctive smell and flavor of cotton candy? That’s not a natural property of spun sugar-- it’s because cotton candy contains a proprietary flavor mix known as “Flossine”.
Think about it, though. If your product contained one of these completely synthetic “spices”, do you think you’d want to write that on the box? Not a great marketing move, especially these days.
Since they will interact with many of the same receptors that existing spices or flavors do, most synthetic flavors will be at least reminiscent of existing spices.
It really is interesting looking at things from the '50s and comparing them to today. I get the sense from the '50s that a big selling point was human ingenuity and mastery over nature. Even doing things better than nature. Even the things focused on nature and nature conservation seemed to be focused on the fact that ruining nature ruined it for us, not just a strict moral argument. Nowadays everything is focused on nature and how natural it is and how it has none of that human-created crap in it.
I work with a guy who used to make flavorings. He says that they added a small amount of green pepper flavor to their strawberry flavoring. This caused enough complexity that people didn’t get bored with the mono-flavor. He also had a lab journal that still smelled like green peppers 3 years after he left the job!
Synthetic vanillin is an exact duplicate of the principle flavoring molecule in natural vanilla. Howver, it’s not the only flavor in natural vanilla. If you want “pure vanilla”, go with synthetic, but if you want a more nuanced, complex flavor, go natural.
Vanillin is a very reasonable approximation, to the first order. It’s not “imitation vanilla”. It’s just not everything that vanilla is.
IMHO, there are valid uses for both vanillin and vanilla, but I usually prefer the latter, especially when it’s the primary flavor, as with vanilla ice cream. But when it’s just a component of a more complex recipe, vanillin can be better by leaving out all those lovely color notes, to avoid conflicting with other elements in the recipe.
Imagine isolating the principle flavoring molecule in coffee. It might be very useful for adding to a cake recipe, for example, but it would probably make terrible coffee – and every cup would taste the same!
