How can they make something taste like a thing without using that thing? I know that they’re synthesised but.. How?
In: Chemistry
Things are made of individual chemicals usally one or a few of those chemicals are what we taste when we eat a thing. If you make these chemicals in a lab it will taste like the thing.
Chemistry trial and error.
Sometimes, it is totally 100% random. Like the first time “grape” artificial flavor was discovered it was a total accident. some guys were doing an entirely different experiment and then one of them realized “hey this one compound we made kind of smells like grapes”. a little bit of testing to make sure it wasnt totally toxic and BOOM grape artificial flavor 100% on accident.
These days, they can try to be a bit more targeted. The process is a relatively simple concept. First, pick a flavor. Second, identify which molecule or combination of molecules is responsible for setting off receptors in your body to cause you to taste that flavor. Third, try your best to copy those molecules. Sometimes they are able to figure out exactly how to copy that molecule and can just make that. Like Vanilla. Synthetic vanilla exists because they figured out how to make the compound “vanillin” from scratch. Other times they cannot figure out how to make an exact copy, but they are able to make a “pretty close” copy that still sets off those receptors in your brain.
If you want a more in depth look at the actual chemical processes, because they are more complex than i know off the top of my head, I would recommend looking up videos comparing synthetic vs natural vanilla. there are a bunch of them. tho some are more cooking focused lol.
Flavours are made of molecules. How many and how complex depends on the flavour, but they’re just molecules nevertheless.
If you can analyse the composition of a flavour, and you can recreate the molecules, you’ve recreated the flavour.
Flavour houses (the manufacturers of flavours) spend A LOT of time and money on analysing flavours, and trying to recreate them for cheap with chemistry.
But sometimes they’re just too complex, either in amount of molecules or thrir structures. Then they might straight up go for extracting the real thing. But depending on what they do with it after, they might not be allowed to advertise “natural flavouring”.
Ok this is making waayy more sense than it did. Thank you all!
Just one final point of confusion – when they copy the molecules of a particular thing, where do they get those new molecules from? Do they make them somehow or extract them from other things?
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