How Candy Learned to Lie

In 1851, London threw itself an enormous party called The Great Exhibition. If you had been there, you’d have wandered through a spectacular glass-and-iron building called the Crystal Palace, gaping in amazement at the inventions, machinery, manufactured goods, and curiosities from around the world—all the most modern evidence that human beings were becoming remarkably good at making things. Among the attractions were special candies—sweets flavored to taste like fruit.

“What’s the big deal with that?” you ask.

At the time, pineapples were expensive, exotic, and something the average person was unlikely to have in their kitchen. Yet wandering through the Crystal Palace, everyday British visitors could taste pineapple in manufactured sweets, candies flavored by chemists who had discovered a way of imitating the fruit without using any of it. Imitation pineapple sounds ordinary today. In 1851, it was astonishing.

FLAVOR FROM THE REAL THING

In the beginning, candy makers got their flavors from the real thing. They used citrus peels, mint, spices, flowers, nuts, and vanilla.

Take an orange. Most of its distinctive aroma comes from fragrant oils concentrated in the outer peel, not the juice. Bend a piece of fresh orange peel and you can sometimes see tiny droplets spray into the air. Those droplets contain aromatic compounds that make an orange smell like an orange. Peppermint works much the same way. Crush a leaf between your fingers and you release its aroma. Extract and concentrate the oil from a large quantity of peppermint leaves, and you have something powerful enough to flavor an enormous batch of candy.

These concentrated plant extracts are called essential oils and they are still widely used to flavor candies and all kinds of foods. Depending on the plant, producers might press the oil from its peel or use steam to carry aromatic compounds out of leaves, flowers, or other plant material.

But there’s a catch. Plants only grow where conditions suit them. Harvests vary. Extracting flavor takes work, and some ingredients are extraordinarily expensive to produce. These aren’t new problems, and flavorists have been working to come up with a solution for hundreds of years.

I like to think Albius would laugh at this: vanilla is STILL very difficult to produce. Vanilla flowers open for just one day and must be pollinated by hand, one at a time. After the beans are harvested, they require months of careful curing to develop their characteristic flavor and aroma. Think about all that work, all that effort …. just to produce a single vanilla bean. Now imagine doing it thousands of times, flower by flower, on a tropical plantation, in the heat. No wonder the dang thing costs $12 a bean.

THE INVENTION OF ARTIFICIAL FLAVOR

Vanilla and other natural flavors are wonderful – IF confectioners can get them. Unfortunately, finding and affording them isn’t always easy, and sometimes using them simply won’t work.

Take strawberries, for example: they contain a great deal of water. Add enough strawberry purée to flavor a batch of hard candy, and you’ve added something that changes the recipe. Worse, the fresh strawberry flavor and delicate aromas change, dissipate, and lose potency when heated. You simply can’t make strawberry candy that tastes like fresh strawberries from … strawberries.

We’ve figured out lots of workarounds: concentrate the purée, freeze-dry the fruit, or alter the candy base in different ways. Those candies don’t taste bad … they just don’t taste quite like fresh strawberries. There are lots of fruits that pose similar problems. There are others that are too seasonal, too expensive, or too rare. Think back to nineteenth-century England. Pineapples were an extravagant, expensive tropical luxury. Even if a confectioner could afford them, guess how many pineapples it would take to flavor a thousand pieces of candy? A lot. That’s the answer. A whole heck of a lot.

Chemists came up with a different plan. Instead of growing, harvesting, shipping, and processing enormous quantities of fruit, they began studying the substances that made those fruits smell the way they did. If they could identify those substances and manufacture them, candy makers could produce concentrated, affordable flavors whenever they needed them.

That’s what made the fruit-flavored sweets at the Great Exhibition so remarkable. The chemists weren’t making pineapples cheaper. They were finding ways to make pineapple flavor without needing the pineapple. And pineapple was only the beginning.

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MANUFACTURING VANILLIN

Vanilla was an obvious target. It was valuable, popular, and extraordinarily labor-intensive to produce.

During the nineteenth century, chemists identified the substances responsible for vanilla’s aroma. One of the most important was vanillin, the compound that gives vanilla its familiar smell. In the 1870s, German chemists Wilhelm Haarmann and Ferdinand Tiemann developed methods for manufacturing vanillin commercially. Suddenly, a major component of vanilla flavor could be produced without growing a single orchid.

This didn’t mean manufactured vanillin tasted exactly like the real thing. Genuine vanilla contains hundreds of different aromatic compounds, and together they create a rich, complicated flavor. But vanillin delivered the familiar vanilla character at a fraction of the cost. That was enormously useful to candy makers. A manufacturer producing thousands of vanilla-flavored sweets no longer had to depend on an expensive crop that required hand-pollinating flowers and months of curing. They could crack open a bottle and get to work. It was a genuine candy revolution.

THINGS GET WEIRD

Here’s where the flavor story really gets going: when food chemists started creating NEW flavors. Take cherry extract, for example. Food chemists decided to use benzaldehyde, a compound with the distinctive aroma of bitter almonds and cherry pits.

If you’ve ever eaten a bright-red cherry candy and thought to yourself, This is pretty good, but it doesn’t actually taste like cherries, you weren’t imagining things. Candy makers built the recognizable cherry flavor around a faked cherry aroma. Then something really odd happened. Generations of people grew up eating cherry snow cones, cherry ICEEs, Skittles, jelly beans, and other “cherry” candies. My parents, yours, YOU grew up eating bright, stain-your-mouth-red, vibrantly, aggressively cherry things… and that particular taste became what you expected—and, oddly enough, what you liked and preferred. It’s not real. But you like it.

THE CHEMISTRY OF PINEAPPLE FLAVOR

If you thought cherry pits were weird, this is going to freak you out a little: there’s a family of compounds called esters that are responsible for many familiar fruity aromas. Different esters can smell like pineapple, pear, banana, or other fruits. They’re pretty cool. Ask a food scientist about them and they’ll talk your ear off.

Remember our friend, fake pineapple? The flavor comes from ethyl butyrate. Here’s how it’s made: chemists get themselves some butyric acid, a nasty-smelling chemical that stinks like rancid butter. Then they mix it with ethanol (the same kind of alcohol found in alcoholic beverages), add an acid catalyst, and start the right chemical reaction. The resulting ester they put in your candy smells sweet, fruity, and pretty close to pineapple. Want some?

NATURAL AND ARTIFICIAL FLAVORS

There’s a temptation to assume that natural flavors are always better than artificial ones. After all, real vanilla comes from an orchid, while manufactured vanillin comes from a chemical process. Surely the orchid wins?

Not necessarily.

Natural flavorings can be wonderful, but they’re often expensive, inconsistent, or difficult to use in certain recipes. Manufactured flavorings can be affordable, reliable, and better suited to the candy you’re trying to make. And here’s something worth remembering: a molecule of vanillin doesn’t become a different molecule because it came from a vanilla bean instead of a manufacturing process. Its chemical identity is the same. What changes is everything else that comes along with it.

Of course, that doesn’t mean a bottle of manufactured vanillin can replace a good vanilla bean in every recipe. Real vanilla has a complicated aroma that comes from hundreds of different compounds working together, and sometimes that complexity is exactly what you want. But there are also recipes where those delicate aromas disappear during cooking, or where a manufactured flavoring simply works better. And this isn’t just about vanilla. The same problem comes up with all kinds of flavors: sometimes the real thing is wonderful, and sometimes the manufactured version does a better job.

THE WORK OF A FLAVORIST

Somewhere in the world, there’s a person with an odd job: making pear-flavored candy taste the way people expect pear candy to taste.

These professionals are called flavorists, and their work combines chemistry with an unusually sophisticated understanding of food. They study the aromatic compounds found in fruits, spices, herbs, and other ingredients, then select, isolate, and blend those compounds to create flavors for everything from candy and ice cream to soft drinks and baked goods.

Imagine a candy manufacturer wants a new peach flavor. The flavorist might begin by studying the aroma of fresh peaches, identifying the compounds that contribute to their characteristic smell. But reproducing those compounds isn’t necessarily enough. The flavor must also work in the finished candy.

A flavor that smells wonderful in a bottle might disappear when heated. Another might taste convincing in a carbonated beverage but completely disgusting in a hard candy. The flavorist has to consider how the product will be manufactured, what other ingredients it contains, and how the flavor will change during storage. And then there’s the human part of the job. Flavorists taste, smell, compare, adjust, and start over. They might make dozens of versions of a particular flavor, changing tiny quantities of individual ingredients until they get the result they’re looking for.

It’s a strange combination of scientist and chef. One part of the job involves understanding molecules; another involves knowing what people actually enjoy eating; a third involves understanding how food is made and stored. And sometimes, what people want to eat isn’t anywhere close to the fruit that inspired it.

FLAVOR COMBINATIONS IN CHOCOLATE

People have been messing around with the flavor of chocolate for centuries. Long before Europeans got the idea to turn chocolate into candy, people were adding vanilla, cinnamon, chili peppers, and all kinds of other things to their cacao drinks. And once chocolate became something you could eat instead of drink, the experimenting really took off.

Think about chocolate and orange. Or peppermint. Or caramel, hazelnuts, cherries, coconut—combinations we’ve eaten so many times that we hardly think about them anymore. But somebody, somewhere, had to be the first person to look at an orange and a piece of chocolate and think, I wonder what would happen if I put these together? Some of those experiments became classics. Others probably tasted terrible.

And apparently, nobody ever decided there was a good reason to stop experimenting. Because some of the things people are putting into chocolate these days are downright bizarre.

You’re up next. You get to start adding weird crap to delicious chocolate and hoping your friends are impressed and not grossed out. Before you add fish oil or avocados or whatever, remember this: chocolate has a flavor of its own. Dark chocolate can be intense, bitter, fruity, or earthy, depending on the cacao and how it’s processed. Milk chocolate brings more sweetness and creamy dairy flavors, while white chocolate has a gentler cocoa butter and dairy character. A delicate flavor that disappears beneath a powerful dark chocolate might work beautifully in white chocolate. And something that balances the bitterness of dark chocolate might make an already-sweet milk chocolate taste cloying.

Then there’s Japan, where KitKat seems to be running an ongoing national flavor experiment. Japanese shoppers can buy KitKats flavored with matcha, wasabi, sake, and sweet potato. Oreo cookies are doing something similar in Korea and Vietnam, pairing the chocolate wafers with everything you could possibly imagine. It is the creativity and versatility of chocolate that makes all of these weird pairings possible and so very, very interesting.

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HOW TO FLAVOR CHOCOLATE

You’ve dreamed up a flavor combination. Maybe dark chocolate and orange, white chocolate and raspberry, or milk chocolate with cinnamon. Now comes the tricky part: getting that flavor in your candy without turning a beautiful bowl of melted chocolate into an expensive, disgusting mess. Take a step back – we’ve got some chocolate chemistry to understand.

DON’T PUT WATER IN YOUR CHOCOLATE

Here’s a great way to ruin a perfectly good bowl of melted chocolate: dump in a spoonful of vanilla extract. It smells wonderful, it’s made from real vanilla, and you’ve used it in a hundred other recipes. What could possibly go wrong?

Quite a lot, actually. Ordinary vanilla extract contains water and alcohol, and melted chocolate doesn’t particularly appreciate either one. Add enough water and the smooth, flowing chocolate can suddenly turn into a thick, grainy mess. Congratulations. You’ve just seized your chocolate.

Here’s why. Chocolate is mostly a suspension of tiny sugar and cocoa particles in fat. When a small amount of water gets into melted chocolate, it starts dissolving the sugar on the surfaces of those particles, creating sticky syrup that makes them clump together. Instead of flowing smoothly, the chocolate thickens into something resembling wet cement.

Now, before somebody points out that ganache is made by mixing chocolate with cream, remember that we’re talking about two different things. When you’re making a solid chocolate bar or a molded chocolate shell, you need the chocolate to stay smooth, fluid, and capable of setting properly. Ganache is a different recipe altogether. We’re deliberately adding enough liquid to create an emulsion, producing a soft, creamy filling rather than solid chocolate. You can use fruit purées, coffee, and other water-based ingredients in ganache because the recipe is designed to accommodate them. Try dumping those same ingredients into chocolate you’re planning to temper and mold, and you’ve got a very different problem.

That doesn’t mean you can’t add flavors to chocolate. It means you need to use the right kind. Some flavor compounds dissolve in water, others in fat, and others in alcohol. Manufacturers use different carriers to deliver those flavors, and a flavoring that works beautifully in cake batter or buttercream might be completely wrong for melted chocolate. For chocolate bars and molded candies, you generally want flavorings specifically designed for chocolate, often labeled oil-soluble or fat-compatible.

And here’s the part that can confuse people: just because you can smell or taste something doesn’t mean it will mix properly into chocolate. A flavoring can smell fantastic in the bottle and still make a disaster of your candy bar. Read the label before you pour.

PROFESSIONAL FLAVORINGS: KNOW THE NAMES

Start shopping for chocolate flavorings and you’ll notice something strange. One company sells a tiny bottle for six bucks, another wants thirty dollars for something that sounds almost identical, and a third sells a container so expensive you’d think somebody had squeezed the flavor out of an actual unicorn.

So what’s the difference? And does spending more money actually get you a better flavor?

• LorAnn Oils is a good place to start experimenting. The company sells a huge assortment of concentrated candy flavorings, many in small, affordable bottles. You can try something unusual without investing a fortune. And they’re at your local craft and hobby store. And Amazon, of course. Everything is on Amazon.
• Amoretti offers a wide range of extracts, concentrates, and specialty flavorings. Some are considerably more expensive, particularly products made with costly ingredients or designed to deliver more complicated flavors.
• Dreidoppel is a familiar name in professional pastry kitchens, especially for its concentrated flavor pastes and compounds. These products are often sold for professional applications rather than the occasional home experiment.

But here’s something worth thinking about when you compare prices: a $30 bottle isn’t necessarily five times as expensive to use as a $6 bottle. If you only need a tiny amount of the expensive stuff to flavor a batch of chocolate, it might actually be the better deal.

And once you find a product that tastes good, works in your recipe, and doesn’t cost a fortune, you’ll understand why professional chefs tend to stick with their favorite suppliers. Nobody wants to repeat the same product research every time they make a batch of chocolate. Chefs work hard (not stupid).

HOW MUCH FLAVORING TO ADD

Concentrated flavorings can be remarkably powerful. A few drops of peppermint oil might give chocolate a pleasant mint flavor. A few drops too many will make the entire batch taste like toothpaste. Bad, rancid, nasty toothpaste.

There is no universal dosage because concentrations vary between manufacturers and products. Start with the manufacturer’s recommended amount, measure carefully, mix thoroughly, and taste before adding more. If you’re experimenting, begin with a small quantity of chocolate rather than risking an entire batch.

WHAT ABOUT POWDERS?

Not every flavor comes in a bottle. Finely ground spices, freeze-dried fruit powders, and other dry ingredients can also flavor chocolate without introducing the water found in fresh fruit. But powders create their own challenges. Chocolate gets its smooth texture partly from the extremely small size of its solid particles. Add coarse cinnamon or gritty fruit powder, and your delicious, creamy chocolate will taste like it sunned itself on Daytona Beach, all sandy and gross. The flavor might be wonderful, but nobody wants to chew their chocolate.

And texture isn’t the only problem. Adding more dry particles tends to thicken melted chocolate, making it harder to pour and mold. Depending on how much powder you’re adding, you may need to adjust the amount of cocoa butter or make other changes to the recipe to keep the chocolate workable.

Here’s my suggestion: use finely processed ingredients suitable for chocolate, and remember that a powder can taste wonderful by itself and taste like poo when mixed into chocolate.

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THE ADDAMS FAMILY FLAVORS

Before you start inventing your own chocolate flavors, there’s something else worth thinking about: some of the most recognizable candy flavors in the world don’t taste much like the foods they’re supposed to represent. In fact, a few of them don’t seem to represent anything at all.

We’ve gotten so used to these flavors that we hardly question them anymore. Orange candy tastes like oranges. Peppermint candy tastes like peppermint. But there are some candies that make absolutely no sense when you stop and think about them.

And then there’s Circus Peanuts.

You know those strange, orange, peanut-shaped marshmallow candies that look like packing material and have approximately the same texture? They taste like bananas. Not peanuts. Not oranges. Bananas. Circus Peanuts have been around since the nineteenth century, and nobody seems to know exactly who invented them—or why somebody decided that an orange peanut should taste like a banana.

So where does that banana flavor come from? One of the main compounds responsible is isoamyl acetate, an ester with a powerful banana-like aroma. It’s a big part of what makes artificial banana candy taste so unmistakably like banana candy, even when it doesn’t taste much like an actual banana.

Somewhere along the way, somebody decided that a bright-orange, peanut-shaped marshmallow that tastes like a banana was a perfectly reasonable thing to sell to people. And somehow, more than a century later, we’re still buying them.

WALTER DIEMER AND BUBBLE GUM

In 1928, a 23-year-old accountant named Walter Diemer was fooling around with chewing gum recipes at the Fleer company in Philadelphia. That’s right. Not a chef or a chemist—an accountant. Diemer’s company had already tried making bubble gum, but their earlier attempt, unfortunately named Blibber-Blubber, was a disaster.

Diemer – experimenting after work, late into the night – stumbled onto a formula that could blow enormous bubbles, wasn’t nearly as sticky, and was pink. Why? Because pink was the only food coloring Diemer had available when he made it. That’s it. No brilliant marketing strategy, no scientific reason. The gum became Dubble Bubble, and bubble gum has been associated with pink ever since.

But here’s a question: what the heck was Diemer’s bubble gum supposed to taste like?

It’s actually a mixture of fruity flavors, including banana, strawberry, and other fruit notes, blended together into something that doesn’t taste quite like any one of them. The exact Dubble Bubble recipe is a company secret, but the flavor has become so recognizable that people have stopped thinking of it as a mixture of fruits and started recognizing it as simply bubble gum.

And apparently we liked it enough to put it into everything else. Now you can buy bubble-gum-flavored ice cream, jelly beans, drinks, and even toothpaste. Which is nasty. But you can buy it.

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HOW PUMPKIN SPICE BECAME A PHENOMENON

Fast-forward to 2003. At Starbucks International Headquarters in Seattle, a development team led by Peter Dukes was working on a new seasonal coffee drink. They wanted something that tasted like autumn, so they tried an unusual experiment: eating pumpkin pie and then sipping espresso to figure out which flavors worked together.

Eventually, they developed the Pumpkin Spice Latte, combining espresso, milk, and a sweet sauce flavored with familiar pumpkin-pie spices. Here’s the funny part: their original drink didn’t contain actual pumpkin. It was designed around the spices people associate with pumpkin pie, especially cinnamon, nutmeg, and clove. Starbucks didn’t add pumpkin purée until 2015.

Customers loved it anyway.

And why wouldn’t they? Most of what people recognize as pumpkin spice isn’t the taste of pumpkin. It’s the aroma of the spices traditionally used to make pumpkin pie. Add those flavors to coffee, and suddenly you’re drinking something that reminds you of Thanksgiving, falling leaves, and cooler weather—even if you’re standing in a Florida parking lot where it’s still 94 degrees.

The drink became so successful that pumpkin spice escaped the coffee cup. It turned up in cookies, breakfast cereals, candies, ice cream, and an astonishing collection of products that had absolutely no business tasting like pumpkin pie.

That’s a pretty impressive trick. Starbucks didn’t invent those spices, and pumpkin pie had been around for generations. But the company helped turn a familiar combination of aromas into a modern flavor phenomenon.

Somewhere between Circus Peanuts and pumpkin spice, the flavor business learned something important: people don’t always want food to taste like the ingredient on the label. Sometimes they want it to taste like childhood. Sometimes they want it to taste like a holiday. And sometimes, for reasons nobody can adequately explain, they want an orange marshmallow peanut that tastes like a banana.

Now it’s your turn to experiment. You’ve learned where flavors come from, why some combinations work better than others, and how to get those flavors into chocolate without ruining it. Maybe you’ll discover something wonderful. Maybe you’ll make something so disgusting that nobody will ever let you forget it. Either way, somebody once decided to make a peanut-shaped marshmallow taste like a banana, and that ridiculous candy has been around for more than a hundred years. So who knows? Maybe your weird idea isn’t so weird after all.

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TERMS TO KNOW

Artificial Flavor

A flavoring made using manufactured compounds rather than obtained entirely from natural sources. It can imitate a familiar food or create a flavor that doesn’t exist in nature.

Natural Flavor

Flavoring derived from natural materials such as fruits, spices, herbs, or other plant and animal sources.

Aromatic Compound

A chemical substance that contributes to a food’s smell. Many of the flavors we recognize depend heavily on these compounds.

Essential Oil

A concentrated mixture of aromatic compounds extracted from plants, often through pressing or steam distillation.

Ester

A family of chemical compounds, many of which have fruity aromas. Esters are important ingredients in numerous candy flavorings.

Vanillin

The compound primarily responsible for vanilla’s familiar aroma. It occurs naturally in vanilla beans and can also be manufactured.

Benzaldehyde

An aromatic compound associated with bitter almonds and cherry pits, commonly used to create cherry-like candy flavors.

Ethyl Butyrate

An ester with a sweet, fruity aroma often associated with pineapple flavoring.

Isoamyl Acetate

An ester with a distinctive banana-like aroma, commonly associated with artificial banana flavoring.

Flavorist

A professional who develops and blends flavoring compounds to create flavors for foods and beverages.

Carrier

A substance used to hold, dilute, or deliver a concentrated flavoring. Different carriers may be suitable for different foods.

Oil-Soluble Flavoring

A flavoring formulated to dissolve or disperse in fat, making it suitable for certain chocolate applications.

Seizing

The sudden thickening and clumping of melted chocolate, often caused by introducing a small amount of water.

Viscosity

A measure of how readily a liquid flows. Adding dry powders to chocolate can increase its viscosity, making it harder to mold or coat candies.

Volatile Compound

A substance that evaporates readily. Many delicate flavor aromas are volatile and can be lost through excessive heating or improper storage.

Ganache

A mixture of chocolate and a water-containing ingredient, commonly cream, formulated to create a smooth emulsion used in fillings, frostings, and desserts.

PEOPLE TO KNOW

Edmond Albius

An enslaved twelve-year-old on the island of Réunion who discovered a practical way to pollinate vanilla orchids by hand in 1841. His technique helped transform commercial vanilla production around the world, although he died in poverty.

Wilhelm Haarmann and Ferdinand Tiemann

German chemists who developed methods for manufacturing vanillin commercially during the 1870s. Their work made one of the world’s most popular flavor compounds available without relying entirely on expensive vanilla beans.

Walter Diemer

A 23-year-old accountant working for the Fleer company in Philadelphia who developed a successful bubble gum formula in 1928. His invention became Dubble Bubble, and its pink color helped establish the familiar appearance of bubble gum.

John Holahan

A General Mills product developer who experimented with cutting up Circus Peanuts and mixing them into Cheerios during the 1960s. That peculiar experiment helped inspire Lucky Charms cereal.

Peter Dukes

A Starbucks product developer who led the team that created the Pumpkin Spice Latte in 2003. The drink helped turn the familiar spices of pumpkin pie into an enormously popular seasonal flavor.

Katrina Markoff

Chocolatier and founder of Vosges Haut-Chocolat, known for experimenting with unusual flavor combinations. Her company’s Mo’s Bacon Bar combines chocolate, smoked bacon, and salt, demonstrating how seemingly strange ingredients can work together.

CHEMICAL REFERENCE: WHAT MAKES CANDY TASTE LIKE CANDY?

Many familiar candy flavors depend on aromatic compounds that occur naturally in foods or can be manufactured. These are some of the chemicals behind the flavors we’ve been talking about. Remember that a single compound doesn’t necessarily reproduce the complete flavor of a fruit.

Vanillin

Associated flavor: Vanilla

The principal compound responsible for vanilla’s familiar aroma. It occurs naturally in vanilla beans and can also be manufactured. Real vanilla contains many additional aromatic compounds.

Benzaldehyde

Associated flavor: Bitter almond, cherry-like

Found naturally in bitter almonds and cherry pits. Its distinctive aroma is an important part of traditional artificial cherry candy flavoring.

Ethyl Butyrate (Ethyl Butanoate)

Associated flavor: Pineapple, sweet fruit

An ester with a powerful fruity aroma. It can be produced by reacting butyric acid with ethanol under suitable conditions and is widely associated with pineapple flavoring.

Isoamyl Acetate

Associated flavor: Banana

An ester with a strong banana-like aroma. It helps create the recognizable flavor of banana candy, including the flavor associated with Circus Peanuts.

Limonene

Associated flavor: Citrus, especially orange

A major aromatic compound in orange peel oil. It contributes to the familiar citrus smell released when you bend or squeeze fresh orange peel.

Menthol

Associated flavor: Mint, cooling sensation

A compound found in peppermint oil that produces a characteristic cooling sensation. It contributes to the recognizable experience of mint-flavored candies.

TWO MORE CHEMICALS WORTH KNOWING

Butyric Acid: A compound with a strong odor often associated with rancid butter. It can react with ethanol to produce ethyl butyrate, an ester with a very different, fruity aroma.

Ethanol: The type of alcohol found in alcoholic beverages. It is one of the reactants used to manufacture ethyl butyrate and is also present in many ordinary flavor extracts.

Remember: A finished flavoring usually contains multiple compounds working together. Knowing the characteristic aroma of one chemical is useful, but it doesn’t mean you’ve discovered the complete recipe for that flavor.