The odd tricks that make processed foods taste like they "should"

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Originally published at: The odd tricks that make processed foods taste like they "should" | Boing Boing

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Long ago Sweden exported raspberry seeds left over from making juice to Poland, where they were put into jam to make it feel more authentic.

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The odd tricks

Good name for a band.

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How about Global Flavorists?

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Artificial Cherry Flavor doesn’t taste like any cherry fruit i’ve ever had, but i still love it. Give me a roll of Regal Crown Sour Cherry candies and i will be quiet for hours.

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And banana oil (amyl acetate) and banana candy no longer smell / taste like real bananas, but I believe it’s because the Cavendish banana has a different flavor than the extinct varieties.

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Not Guardian. BBC.

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Interestingly, most flavor science starts with smell not taste.

So maybe my terrible sense of smell explains why most artificial strawberry, coconut, and pineapple taste disgusting to me… :nauseated_face:

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my favorite potential band name is still some haggard phantom. it omes from tolkien and if i ever get to do a collab with merzbow, that’s what i’d want to call it.

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I find food engineering so fascinating. Part of me thinks I could have missed my calling, but at the same time, it’ so… strange

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most of those artificial flavors do have a very overpowering smell.

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Anyone else find artificial watermelon flavor just yucky?

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It’s the absolute worst.

For extra fun, try watermelon Mt. Dew…worse than watermelon White Claw, which I can almost tolerate.

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The statement that “flavor science starts with smell, not taste” caught my eye because I’ve recently had a couple experiences with processed foods that smelled great when you opened the bag, but tasted like almost nothing.

What I want is a coffee drink that lives up to the smell of fresh roasted coffee beans.

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There are additives for flavor and color and that improve texture and “mouth feel.” It makes me want to see and try the products without the additives. I envision a lot of beige food in various shapes. Some salty, some sweet. Some hard, some soft.

Salty Carbohydrate Triangles
Chewy Dessert Disks
Dry Sugared Breakfast Shapes

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I’m much the same with artificial banana flavour (there’s rumours it’s based on Gros Michel bananas, which are apparently unfounded).

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IIRC the Gros Michel banana still does exist, in a few very protected places, but can’t be grown commercial because the disease that wipes it out is still out there - and new forms will most likely eventually wipe out the Cavendish, too. Bananas are especially vulnerable to disease because they’re all genetically identical, we need the fertile seeds out of them a long time ago.

Edit to add: I have a coworker who once got to eat such a Gros Michel, and said it did in fact taste much more like artificial banana flavor.

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Fruits and vegetables hate this one weird trick.

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Some years back I ended up diving into the exciting world of modified food starches because a friend’s prop project required little polymer clay models to be suspended in ‘liquid’ inside containers of various shapes; so we needed options of various opacities that would be easy to work with, compatible with the dyes we were using to color the various flasks and containers; and stiff enough to suspend the models.

My parents were…thankfully not quick to judgement…when multiple pounds of cryptically labelled white powders from unfamiliar suppliers started showing up addressed to me.

During our search for exactly the right ingredient for the job I was struck by how the names ranged from utterly banal mostly numerical codes(often corn starches for industrial purposes) to probably-not-as-exciting-as-it-sounds (“Action Gum 100” sounds like it belongs in the backstory of a D-list superhero; but no, “Action Gum 100 is a synergistic system of hydrocolloids widely used in food and beverage applications including sauces, dressings, soups and baked goods. Action Gum 100 is designed to provide mouthfeel, viscosity and stability in finished food applications.”) to “FDA GRAS foodstuff or of immediate concern to the OPCW?” (“Purity Cloud 314”, “Hylon VII” and “Purity Alpha 865” always struck me as particularly sinister-sounding)

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