I had actually always wondered how "vanilla" had come to be associated with being bland and uninteresting given its origin as an exotic bean that only grows on one island.
@@Carewolf Good ice cream can have good vanilla. But where most of the bland flavour of vanilla that people think it is, is due to cheap ice cream that doesn't even use any cream. In some places, they had to legally call it something else.
@@gredangeo True. I mean here in Denmark they've started using real vanilla in dedicated vanilla ice cream for about a decade now, mostly listed as "Bourbon vanilla" or something similar, and it tastes great. Other things that involve vanilla ice cream as a base though like straciatella, cookie dough, or brownie ice cream and popsicles still use artificials though. You can even see the difference visually, with the real vanilla ice cream having a very yellow colour, whereas the artificial vanilla has a a white look to it.
Here are all the irrelevant fun facts from 1:29: A drink that's 10% less sweet but colored red will be perceived as sweeter than one that's not. Potato chip bags are crinkly on purpose, because the sound tricks our brain into thinking the chips taste fresher. Low-pitched sounds can make food taste more bitter, and high-pitched sounds can make food taste sweeter. If you dye a steak bright blue it really freaks people out. We can tell whether a liquid is hot or cold by the sound it makes when it's being poured. Froot Loops are all the same flavor. If you close your eyes, you won't be able to tell the difference between any of them. The background noise on airplanes enhances the taste of umami. Sour candies are often coated in sugar because rough textures make foods taste more sour. Looking at pictures of high-calorie foods before eating something will make it taste better.
When I was young my parents took me to a vanilla plantation in Hawaii. The owner was actually obsessed with vanilla, the way people are connoisseurs about wine. I think he was kind of nuts. He also looked like Al from Toy Story 2.
Imagine all of the undiscovered flavors in the countless untasted butts around the world. There is still a chance for you to discover something incredible!
I don't like banana`s and while I agree fake banana does not taste anything like real banana,. it still manages to taste worse, it taste like vomit to me
"Artificial strawberry is just strawberry with bad graphics." The best line I've heard in a long time. That wins. Also, the source of one of the more common artificial vanillin is just... wood. Yup. It's made from plain old wood. From trees.
Another factor with artificial flavors is that not all chemical compounds last as long as each other. There might be 10 or 20 or even a hundred different compounds that go into a flavor from a fruit, but how many of those flavors will keep for a week? A month? Possibly years sitting on a store shelf? Make something with fresh fruit and you'll find that the flavor gradually fades away over time and only certain parts of that flavor remain - like compare peach jelly made with fresh peaches that's weeks or months old with currently fresh peaches and you'll find that a lot of the flavor complexity has faded. That's a big part of why watermelon flavor tastes so unlike watermelon; the chemical that is watermelon flavor is actually found in watermelon in a large amount but most of the other chemical compounds found in a watermelon will barely keep a few days, so only that one chemical is suitable for use in a candy or a soda or anything that's going to be sitting on shelves for a long time.
Wonder if Guy Fieri realizes how wealthy he could actually be if the candy and soda manufacturers consulted with him on the artificial flavors they use. I mean, with him being the mayor of Flavortown and all, you'd think it'd be a no-brainer.
Hi, I’m Guy Fyiddy and I’m not looking at the road while driving - so I’ll probably have a fatal accident before we finish looking for these DANrs, DRAVns, nDAVs
my sisters husband makes artificial flavors for a living. he literally tests shit like citrus and watermelon for everything like drink companies and food chains. you’d be surprised how widely spread these things are. i was drinking a beer once and he went “you know my company made the blueberry flavor in that right?”
Just buy some actual vanilla and you'll know for sure that it's the same taste you have always tasted, unlike chocolate, vanilla is actually quite simple! Vanillin is all you'll need and your more than 80% of the way to real naturally grown vanilla. Chocolate on the hand is super hard! There's like 200 different chemicals that make up it's flavor and odor profile.
@@sion8 I had the chance to taste real vanilla (in a dish) and was by surprised by both how different and how similar it tastes. The main aroma is very very similar, but the real deal has some extra layers of funk that I suspect most people who grew up on fake vanilla won't like or may find odd.
@@plz7788 I've also tasted real vanilla, like I said it's very much the same thing. I'm not saying that's a strike against one or the other, is just that “fake vanilla” (as you call it) isn't that far unlike artificial banana or grape, although the cultivars of those fruits that are imitated aren't commonly eaten today, that's mostly why they taste so different! If you had the previous cultivar of banana that most people ate way back when you'd probably feel the same as you described vanilla and its artificial counterpart.
@@rabidfurify I thought a lot of them are extract based, rather than real beans based (yes I know extracts are supposed to come from the real stuff to) ? At least I've never noticed the products using the beans... maybe it's just my market or my budget...
Funnily enough there was a banana split flavoured milk in Australia that tasted scarily real. You could taste the caramel, you could taste the ice cream, you could taste the banana and you could taste the wafer, which was the weirdest bit. It tasted horrible but it was scary accurate
Why the hell would you put a “wafer” in a banana split?! What the hell are you guys doing down there? 🤨 Sorry let me put that into Australian 🇦🇺 _kangarooing intensifies_ 🦘 ¿ǝɹǝɥʇ uʍop ɓuᴉop sʎnɓ noʎ ǝɹɐ ʅʅǝɥ ǝɥʇ ʇɐɥM ¡¿ʇᴉʅds ɐuɐuɐq ɐ uᴉ ɹǝɟɐʍ ɐ ʇnd noʎ pʅnoʍ ʅʅǝɥ ǝɥʇ ʎɥM
I'm reminded of the NileRed video where he turns latex gloves into grape flavoring and makes a soda. It wasn't a terribly good soda though, because real grape soda uses a much wider range of flavors to create a more complete experience. It's rare you can just add one molecule to create a great taste and not end up with something that's kinda one-dimensional.
Around age 30, I tasted a concord grape for the first time and realized that's what fake-grape was mimicking. Wine grapes don't taste anything like that.
Putting aside the fact that, as a kid, vile faux cherry flavor cough medicine ruined cherries forever for me, the joke I like to tell is that, for example, Fanta "grape" soda doesn't taste so much like grapes, as it represents the closest approximation to what "purple" would taste like if colors had a taste.
I physically cannot eat anything grape flavored because of that grape flavor cough medicine we had when we were children. It just makes me think of medicine whenever I eat anything like that.
One time I bought these very ripe frozen Turkish cherries, and while they mostly tasted like the fresh ones they actually had hints of what we call “artificial cherry flavor.” Apparently therefore the chemical responsible for “artificial cherry flavor” is actually found in cherries but in a much smaller concentration, and it’s mixed with other chemicals that give cherries a more “real flavor.”
@@gravelroad1228 Yup - artificial cherry flavor is really maraschino liquor flavor (as in maraschino cherries) - and that gets its flavor from cherry pits - which contain benzaldehyde, which is basically what "cherry", "almond", "marzipan", and "cream" artificial flavors are. One of my favorites.
@@matthewmartin3787 Ehhhh, it's hit-or-miss for me, like most medicine flavors. Besides fruit punch. Fruit punch is ALWAYS a miss and it can go die in a hole
as someone who isn’t british, has never been to britain, and doesn’t know anything about british slang, i can confirm that pears are indeed called “pobbily wobbilies”
i am a chemist (though not a food chemist!) and not only is it hard figure out what chemicals make up a real flavor, it can be difficult and expensive to synthesize them. And yes, sometimes random lab chemicals do smell a bit like fruit!
The problem is that people get used to artificial flavors. For example a strawberry desert tastes like strawberry but when you eat real strawberrys, they taste like water with a small hint of strawberry. Woodruff flavored things do taste great. A cook did the test and let people eat jelly with real woodruff and artificial woodruff. The people didn't liked the real woodruff at all. That same cook or like he calls himself a "food engineer" has a show in Germany, where he shows the people how the industry does stuff, because that was and still is his job. It looks more like chemistry but not like cooking. I think people would rather buy products with for example real orange flavor instead of tree parts that taste like orange or even a chemical, that might have health risks. Sure with an orange, the skin might be better for the flavor but that is still part of an orange that get thrown away my most people.
Sam, I'm very disappointed that you failed to mention that one of the earliest replacements for vanilla was goo from a beaver's butt, but now we mostly get it from wood pulp (seriously).
This reminds me of the Nile Red video where he makes artificial grape flavor from vinyl* gloves. It’s been a while since I’ve seen the video, but it’s a fun video if you are into silly science stuff! Edit: It was vinyl gloves, not rubber gloves
I remember that, and it turns out it wasn't that good because artificial grape flavor isn't just Methyl Anthranilate, but includes like a dozen other chemicals to round out the flavor. Flavor chemistry is pretty interesting
It's kind of similar to why artificial educational channels aren't accurate: because the fake stuff has become a stuff on its own that people want. You don't want a banana candy tasting like actual banana, and you don't want this guy from HAI making actual educational content like that guy from Wendover would.
That was excellent. Now do one about how flavoured teas don't taste like anything except, if it contains any, tea. I was struck by the observation about the five base flavours being all our mouth can taste, the rest of the work done by scent. Flavoured herbal teas seem to be all scent no flavour, meaning I can smell the scent, and the liquid still tastes like nothing.
irrelevant fun facts: 1- drink that’s 10% less sweet but colored red will be perceived as sweeter than one that’s not. 2- potato chip bags are crinkly on purpose because the sound tricks our brains into thinking the chips taste fresher 3- low-pitched sounds can make food taste more bitter, and high-pitched sounds can make the food taste sweeter 4- if you dye a steak bright blue it really freaks people out 5- we can tell if a liquid is hot or cold by the sound it makes when it’s being poured 6- froot loops are all the same flavor, if you close you eyes, you won’t be able to tell the difference between any of them 7- the background noise on airplanes enhances the taste of umami 8- sour candies are often coated in sugar because rough textures make foods taste more sour 9- looking at pictures of high-calorie foods before eating something will make it taste better
Honestly, grape flavor is pretty spot on to Concord grapes. I used to be a vintner, and I will never forget the first day I had a fresh Concord grape. I literally shouted "THIS IS WHY GRAPE DOESNT TASTE LIKE GRAPE! THIS IS THE GRAPE THEY WERE TALKING ABOUT".
1:28 *The paragraph was:* _A drink that's 10% less sweet but colored red will be perceived as sweeter than one that's not. Potato chip bags are crinkly on purpose because the sound tricks our brains into thinking the chips taste fresher. Low-pitched sounds can make food taste more bitter and high-pitched sounds can make food taste sweeter. If you dye a steak bright blue it reall freaks people out. We can tell whether a liquid is hot or cold by the sound it makes when being poured. Froot loops are all the same flavor. If you close your eyes, you won't be able to tell the difference between any of them. The background noise on airplanes enhances the taste of umami. Sour candies are often coated in sugar because rough textures make foods taste more sour. Looking at pictures of high calorie foods before eating something will make it taste better._ You can see the text for yourself by playing video at 0.25x speed, pausing just to read and rewinding multiple times.
I've always noticed that japanese strawberry flavoring had a distinctly different flavor than the artificial strawberry flavor I'm used to. I wonder if japan has a different artificial strawberry flavor?
They can never get the viscosity right for a lot of flavored drinks. It's something you don't really think of but fruit juices aren't like water, they're slightly heavier and stickier, and without that viscosity, it doesn't taste right.
1:29 Fun facts: A drink that's 10% less sweet but coloured red will be perceived as sweeter than the one that's not. Potato chip bags are crinkly on purpose, because the sound tricks our brain into thinking the chips taste fresher. Low pitched sounds can make food taste more bitter, and high-pitched sounds can make the food taste sweeter. If you dye a steak bright blue it really freaks people out. We can tell whether a liquid is hot or cold by the sound it makes when it's being poured. Fruit loops are all the same flavour. If you close your eyes, you won't be able to tell the difference between any of them. The background noise on airplanes enhances the taste of umami. Some candies are often coated in sugar because rough textures make foods taste more sour. Looking at pictures of high-calorie foods before eating something will make it taste better.
So now the question is: how come artificial flavors developed in Japan taste so much better (that is, closer to their real-life counterparts) than those developed in the US?
Based on so many people preferring artificial flavors, they should just make unique flavors instead of trying to make them taste like other things that taste bad.
Most people don't know this but I used to get good quality inexpensive vanilla beans directly from Madagascar on eBay until around 2011. Then the French came in and I don't know how they did this but they monopolised the bean production there, causing all the direct producer/vendors to disappear from sites like eBay. The prices tripled instantly. I don't know why this was never talked about at the time.
Are you sure about methyl anthranilate used as an artificial flavor before its discovery in grapes? It was described by F. B. Power in 1920 in fruit juices and published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.
Hey I watched this video when it came out. I learned today of a sorta correction. Although Madagascar is a large producer of vanilla, it is not native to the island. It’s actually native to Mexico!
I make vape liquid for myself and strawberry can be extremely difficult to use. There are dozens of different strawberry flavorings from different companies, but to mix up an authentic flavor is hard. Some people can't even taste whatever chemicals are used to make strawberry.
Real vanilla is still much more complex than the fake vanilla. But you only really notice when it's the stand out flavour in the dish, like in Panna Cotta. The complexity of vanilla gets lost anyway in most dishes, so fake vanilla is often good enough. But I definitely recommend to everyone to make Panna Contra with real vanilla. Completely changes your view on vanilla
Grape flavored candy is the reason i didnt actually try real grapes until middle school, i thought "if the sweeter version of this food tastes like THIS what does the actual fruit taste like?!"
I never really understood what these different flavors were. To me, all fruit taste very similar, like with varying levels of sweetness, and bitterness, and whatever else. Maybe it just has to do with me being unable to smell anything.
Oh, you've got anosmia? I had covid and got that, so I understand that feeling of everything tasting the same. Smell is really something most people take for granted.
Common misunderstandings are based on the fact that the package labeling of food and other products is misleading when it comes to complexity. If you compare the list of ingredients from a "natural" product versus its "synthetic" equivalent, the synthetic one will often have the much longer list, giving you the idea that the companies have put a lot of additives in there that are presumably unnecessary and maybe bad for your health. When in reality, it's quite the opposite. The lists of ingredients on natural products seems shorter because companies are legally allowed to be inaccurate here and replace a list of more than 20 different chemicals with something like "apple". It's like sending invitations for a party, but instead of making a list of all the guest names, you just write down the adress of everyone. If one of these adresses is a very big house with multiple people in it, your short list of invitations might cover up a significantly higher number of actual guests. The large number of chemicals in natural products are also often handled with little care. If it's known that a plant has a high amount of a toxic chemical in it, this one will be removed in the production process of course. But especially with the minor components, companies just have the tendency to ignore them. And unlike what some religions might tell you, nature doesn't exist for the sole purpose of being used by humans and produces a lot of things that are really not good for you. On the other hand, if a synthetic product is made from scratch, you can be sure that there is nothing in it that wasn't put in there for a good reason. Of course, in some cases people will try to mimic something they found in nature and the result will be trash. But you should really get away from this mindset of "right" or "wrong" flavors.
I've noticed that we basically have two totally unrelated flavors for every fruit. The real fruit, and the artifical flavor who's only relation seems to be in name. Seems like they tried a lot harder to make it taste similar than I imagined, if I had no idea what a strawberry or banana was and I was given the artificial flavor and the real fruit I would discern no relation between them.
Sam be like "why artificial flavours taste so accurate?" And I am like "whaaaaaaat! They never do, that's why I love fruits but hate everything fruit flavoured"
This reminds me of a soda I had recently from a somewhat local company. I'd bought a couple different bottles to try, and liked pretty much all of them... up until I got to the black cherry. Two sips in I very quickly determined that a) they used no small amount of artificial cherry flavor, and thusly b) it was disgusting. Never have I dumped a bottle of soda as quickly as that. My disappointment was immeasurable. And then I broke out a cream soda and all was right with the world once more.
I didn't know most of the info you skipped over in the star wars fast forward, and it's all genuinely interesting. Kinda surprised you didn't use that material normally.
NileRed tried to turn plastic gloves into grape flavor for soda… it was a huge pain, but did taste like grape soda once added to an estimate of what’s in Kool Aide powder and carbonated water.)
Honest question: could you do this with meat? Both in the "add some to low grade meat to make it better" as well as the "replace meat with something with vaguely the same consistency and artificial flavors" variety?
My brother is an award-winning sommelier, and he believes it's because he was born with a Jacobsen's organ. A small percentage of people have an extra sense from a cluster of nerves located at the juncture where the nose and throat meet, and this gives them super-accurate capacity for discerning flavour. It's s sense which is half-taste and half-smell, being a combination of both.
I would imagine that many volatile aromatic compounds that give fruit their flavor are, well, too volatile and degrade way too quickly. Many of the phenolic compounds of something like an apple can degrade rather quickly, and synthesizing them would be way too expensive compared to actually just extracting them from an apple
HEY DON'T BULLY THE GREEN APPLE. Its my favorite flavor of them. Its wrong to bully the flavor of one some of them, Also its not green apple its sour apple. If you want to be honest and/or correct then its (sour green apple) Time stamp: 3:18 - 3:30
The best tea in the world comes from Mauritius and has real Vanilla in it. We found it while visiting the island and still buy it and have it shipped to us in the US.I have seen it for sale in stores in Dubai and once in Europe but never in the US.
I believe that the 5 tastes of sweet, sour, salty, bitter, and umami will be one of those things that we'll look back on years from now and laugh about.
I think you are an original genius. You are to narration what Davinchi was to everything else. A special pick, something that would normally only occur in a population of at least a trillion (your existence is still entirely plausible).
I had actually always wondered how "vanilla" had come to be associated with being bland and uninteresting given its origin as an exotic bean that only grows on one island.
Ice-cream. It is the default/basic flavour of ice-cream, unless you want to go fancy and add other stuff.
@@Carewolf Good ice cream can have good vanilla. But where most of the bland flavour of vanilla that people think it is, is due to cheap ice cream that doesn't even use any cream. In some places, they had to legally call it something else.
@@gredangeo True. I mean here in Denmark they've started using real vanilla in dedicated vanilla ice cream for about a decade now, mostly listed as "Bourbon vanilla" or something similar, and it tastes great. Other things that involve vanilla ice cream as a base though like straciatella, cookie dough, or brownie ice cream and popsicles still use artificials though. You can even see the difference visually, with the real vanilla ice cream having a very yellow colour, whereas the artificial vanilla has a a white look to it.
@@nichole4684 this is the sencond most nonsensical rambling I've ever read in my life. Congratulations.
@@gredangeo I judge an ice cream maker by their vanilla ice cream, and a donut shop by their raised glazed donut. Master the basics, first.
Here are all the irrelevant fun facts from 1:29:
A drink that's 10% less sweet but colored red will be perceived as sweeter than one that's not.
Potato chip bags are crinkly on purpose, because the sound tricks our brain into thinking the chips taste fresher.
Low-pitched sounds can make food taste more bitter, and high-pitched sounds can make food taste sweeter.
If you dye a steak bright blue it really freaks people out.
We can tell whether a liquid is hot or cold by the sound it makes when it's being poured.
Froot Loops are all the same flavor. If you close your eyes, you won't be able to tell the difference between any of them.
The background noise on airplanes enhances the taste of umami.
Sour candies are often coated in sugar because rough textures make foods taste more sour.
Looking at pictures of high-calorie foods before eating something will make it taste better.
Thanks man
God's work
Damn why didn't i checked comments earlier i was pausing the video so i could read💀
lol, dyeing steak bright blue.
Thanks! I'll try out the hot vs cold liquid, that sounds neat.
When I was young my parents took me to a vanilla plantation in Hawaii. The owner was actually obsessed with vanilla, the way people are connoisseurs about wine. I think he was kind of nuts. He also looked like Al from Toy Story 2.
Aww, I think that's sweet. He's passionate about what he does.
I love that you included he looked like Al from Toy Story 2. I laughed way too hard at that!
To be fair Al from Toy Story 2 was also obsessed with childrens' toys
Vanilla is no joke. From what I remember some vanilla is aged in bourbon barrels.
@@fffrrraannkk OH! Is that why it’s called Bourbon Vanilla?!
I admire the bravery of the men and women that discovered the vanilla taste of beaver butt
Technically it's a gland adjacent to the beaver's butt.
...if that knowledge gives you any peace of mind at all.
@@imveryangryitsnotbutter the real question is inside or outside the rectum
@@1nsaniel Does it really matter at this point? We know someone was fiddling with beaver rectum either way.
natives.
Imagine all of the undiscovered flavors in the countless untasted butts around the world. There is still a chance for you to discover something incredible!
I personally love “banana” flavored things, not because it tastes like banana, but because I just like the taste
I don't like banana`s and while I agree fake banana does not taste anything like real banana,. it still manages to taste worse, it taste like vomit to me
I don't know maybe you would like to find somewhere online where they sell the older type of cultivar that was used before the current one.
@@resolecca Ah... and here I was thinking I'm the only person in the world who hates bananas. it's quite a niche trait. 😄
The Fake Banana Flavor is an actual Flavor, the species of Banana it tastes like is now extinct due to the blight.
@@michaelfederico2873 oh really? interesting
"Artificial strawberry is just strawberry with bad graphics."
The best line I've heard in a long time. That wins.
Also, the source of one of the more common artificial vanillin is just... wood. Yup. It's made from plain old wood. From trees.
Another factor with artificial flavors is that not all chemical compounds last as long as each other. There might be 10 or 20 or even a hundred different compounds that go into a flavor from a fruit, but how many of those flavors will keep for a week? A month? Possibly years sitting on a store shelf? Make something with fresh fruit and you'll find that the flavor gradually fades away over time and only certain parts of that flavor remain - like compare peach jelly made with fresh peaches that's weeks or months old with currently fresh peaches and you'll find that a lot of the flavor complexity has faded. That's a big part of why watermelon flavor tastes so unlike watermelon; the chemical that is watermelon flavor is actually found in watermelon in a large amount but most of the other chemical compounds found in a watermelon will barely keep a few days, so only that one chemical is suitable for use in a candy or a soda or anything that's going to be sitting on shelves for a long time.
So that's why I love watermelon flavoring and hate watermelon?
@@LiberalsReadmyBio probably, yeah.
Wonder if Guy Fieri realizes how wealthy he could actually be if the candy and soda manufacturers consulted with him on the artificial flavors they use. I mean, with him being the mayor of Flavortown and all, you'd think it'd be a no-brainer.
Hi, I’m Guy Fyiddy and I’m not looking at the road while driving - so I’ll probably have a fatal accident before we finish looking for these DANrs, DRAVns, nDAVs
@@gurrrn1102 lmao that show cant possibly still b on the air can it? They used to play it literally ALL FUCKING DAY 🤦♂️
Low Resolution Flavors has to be the best analogy ever to describe this.
my sisters husband makes artificial flavors for a living. he literally tests shit like citrus and watermelon for everything like drink companies and food chains. you’d be surprised how widely spread these things are. i was drinking a beer once and he went “you know my company made the blueberry flavor in that right?”
Finally, an answer to why I like grapes but grape flavored things are absolutely disgusting.
I have this with strawberries
I kinda prefer it to real grapes though.
I think watermelon flavor is even worse. It's nothing like real watermelon.
I love grape flavor things but I don't like grapes.
@@zamppa3974 agree
A lesson on how to make a bunch of stock footage half as interesting.
Is this your first day here?
lol
I’m not sure if this a joke or an actual jab 🤣
Is this the first video you've watched on UA-cam? Lol
NVM I see Jason has already covered this
throwback to when I synthesized fake banana flavoring in a lab and then spilled it everywhere so my bench smelled like bananas for weeks
There's this Japanese bubblegum I've been chewing since I was a kid that tastes almost exactly like black grapes. It's some good stuff!
Wow, how does it keep it's flavor for so long!?
@@palleppalsson 😂😂😂
What's it called? This sounds fascinating.
Yeah I want to know the name too.
Is it Fūsen?
The reality is, most of us have NEVER had the chance to taste real vanilla, so we would never know if 'fake' vanilla actually tastes fake
Just buy some actual vanilla and you'll know for sure that it's the same taste you have always tasted, unlike chocolate, vanilla is actually quite simple! Vanillin is all you'll need and your more than 80% of the way to real naturally grown vanilla. Chocolate on the hand is super hard! There's like 200 different chemicals that make up it's flavor and odor profile.
@@sion8 I had the chance to taste real vanilla (in a dish) and was by surprised by both how different and how similar it tastes. The main aroma is very very similar, but the real deal has some extra layers of funk that I suspect most people who grew up on fake vanilla won't like or may find odd.
@@plz7788
I've also tasted real vanilla, like I said it's very much the same thing. I'm not saying that's a strike against one or the other, is just that “fake vanilla” (as you call it) isn't that far unlike artificial banana or grape, although the cultivars of those fruits that are imitated aren't commonly eaten today, that's mostly why they taste so different! If you had the previous cultivar of banana that most people ate way back when you'd probably feel the same as you described vanilla and its artificial counterpart.
This seriously oversells the exoticness of real vanilla, you can buy real fresh vanilla bean products and they're not massively expensive.
@@rabidfurify I thought a lot of them are extract based, rather than real beans based (yes I know extracts are supposed to come from the real stuff to) ? At least I've never noticed the products using the beans... maybe it's just my market or my budget...
Funnily enough there was a banana split flavoured milk in Australia that tasted scarily real.
You could taste the caramel, you could taste the ice cream, you could taste the banana and you could taste the wafer, which was the weirdest bit.
It tasted horrible but it was scary accurate
Woah
Why the hell would you put a “wafer” in a banana split?! What the hell are you guys doing down there? 🤨
Sorry let me put that into Australian 🇦🇺
_kangarooing intensifies_ 🦘
¿ǝɹǝɥʇ uʍop ɓuᴉop sʎnɓ noʎ ǝɹɐ ʅʅǝɥ ǝɥʇ ʇɐɥM ¡¿ʇᴉʅds ɐuɐuɐq ɐ uᴉ ɹǝɟɐʍ ɐ ʇnd noʎ pʅnoʍ ʅʅǝɥ ǝɥʇ ʎɥM
@@TheBrianFlanagan someone hasn't had banana pudding in the southeast US
@@TheBrianFlanagan goddamn that was mad funny
@@TheBrianFlanagan "kangarooing intensifies 🦘" 😭😭
I'm reminded of the NileRed video where he turns latex gloves into grape flavoring and makes a soda. It wasn't a terribly good soda though, because real grape soda uses a much wider range of flavors to create a more complete experience. It's rare you can just add one molecule to create a great taste and not end up with something that's kinda one-dimensional.
Around age 30, I tasted a concord grape for the first time and realized that's what fake-grape was mimicking. Wine grapes don't taste anything like that.
Similarly, there are jelly grapes that actually taste like grape jelly.
"Artificial strawberry is just strawberry with bad graphics"
Weird because I actually prefer the taste of artificial strawberries over the real ones.
You mean just like how I prefer games from the year 2000 over their successors released nowadays?
Ok but when did anyone ask
Same here! I loooove strawberry milkshakes. Yet they taste absolutely nothing like actual strawberries.
I 100% disagree with you but also respect your opinion 😌
That explains why Minecraft is so popular.
Putting aside the fact that, as a kid, vile faux cherry flavor cough medicine ruined cherries forever for me, the joke I like to tell is that, for example, Fanta "grape" soda doesn't taste so much like grapes, as it represents the closest approximation to what "purple" would taste like if colors had a taste.
Artificial cherry is the best medicine flavor though! I mean, it's not hard to beat Vicks, mint, or bubblegum but still.
I physically cannot eat anything grape flavored because of that grape flavor cough medicine we had when we were children. It just makes me think of medicine whenever I eat anything like that.
One time I bought these very ripe frozen Turkish cherries, and while they mostly tasted like the fresh ones they actually had hints of what we call “artificial cherry flavor.” Apparently therefore the chemical responsible for “artificial cherry flavor” is actually found in cherries but in a much smaller concentration, and it’s mixed with other chemicals that give cherries a more “real flavor.”
@@gravelroad1228 Yup - artificial cherry flavor is really maraschino liquor flavor (as in maraschino cherries) - and that gets its flavor from cherry pits - which contain benzaldehyde, which is basically what "cherry", "almond", "marzipan", and "cream" artificial flavors are. One of my favorites.
@@matthewmartin3787 Ehhhh, it's hit-or-miss for me, like most medicine flavors. Besides fruit punch. Fruit punch is ALWAYS a miss and it can go die in a hole
3:14 - "We have penicillin"
**Shows a picture of a bunch of mints**
as someone who isn’t british, has never been to britain, and doesn’t know anything about british slang, i can confirm that pears are indeed called “pobbily wobbilies”
i am a chemist (though not a food chemist!) and not only is it hard figure out what chemicals make up a real flavor, it can be difficult and expensive to synthesize them. And yes, sometimes random lab chemicals do smell a bit like fruit!
Or Almonds, benzaldehyde. I was tempted to take a deep whiff from the brown bottle
i love your brain. you and your team comes up with the most batshit, entertaining ways to explain things, and i'm all for it
Says, "We have rockets now," then shows stock footage of a rocket we no longer have
Penicillin also has been around for a very long time, I think it was meant as a joke
After watching this video, the word 'flavor' has lost all meaning
After Noah Webster hacked the u out of it, the word “flavor” has lost all flavour
You're just ______ Lab now.
The problem is that people get used to artificial flavors. For example a strawberry desert tastes like strawberry but when you eat real strawberrys, they taste like water with a small hint of strawberry. Woodruff flavored things do taste great. A cook did the test and let people eat jelly with real woodruff and artificial woodruff. The people didn't liked the real woodruff at all.
That same cook or like he calls himself a "food engineer" has a show in Germany, where he shows the people how the industry does stuff, because that was and still is his job. It looks more like chemistry but not like cooking.
I think people would rather buy products with for example real orange flavor instead of tree parts that taste like orange or even a chemical, that might have health risks. Sure with an orange, the skin might be better for the flavor but that is still part of an orange that get thrown away my most people.
I love artificial watermelon. It's weird and unique and that's what makes it good. It absolutely doesn't taste like watermelon but I don't care
THE FAST FORWARD PART IS CRAZY FUCKING INTERESTING
Sam, I'm very disappointed that you failed to mention that one of the earliest replacements for vanilla was goo from a beaver's butt, but now we mostly get it from wood pulp (seriously).
This reminds me of the Nile Red video where he makes artificial grape flavor from vinyl* gloves. It’s been a while since I’ve seen the video, but it’s a fun video if you are into silly science stuff!
Edit: It was vinyl gloves, not rubber gloves
That same guy also converted toilet paper into alcohol, which is interesting for both scientific and drinking reasons.
I remember that, and it turns out it wasn't that good because artificial grape flavor isn't just Methyl Anthranilate, but includes like a dozen other chemicals to round out the flavor. Flavor chemistry is pretty interesting
It's kind of similar to why artificial educational channels aren't accurate: because the fake stuff has become a stuff on its own that people want. You don't want a banana candy tasting like actual banana, and you don't want this guy from HAI making actual educational content like that guy from Wendover would.
HAI and Wendover colab would blow people's mind
@@jstan5802 Are you kidding? Those guys HATE each other.
i'm confused......
@@dumigamez397 It's okay. We've all had that phase in our lives.
@@jbird4478 wa
That was excellent. Now do one about how flavoured teas don't taste like anything except, if it contains any, tea. I was struck by the observation about the five base flavours being all our mouth can taste, the rest of the work done by scent. Flavoured herbal teas seem to be all scent no flavour, meaning I can smell the scent, and the liquid still tastes like nothing.
i always saw vanilla as basically the closest to “no flavour”
like i saw comparing chocolate to vanilla like comparing orange juice to water
irrelevant fun facts:
1- drink that’s 10% less sweet but colored red will be perceived as sweeter than one that’s not.
2- potato chip bags are crinkly on purpose because the sound tricks our brains into thinking the chips taste fresher
3- low-pitched sounds can make food taste more bitter, and high-pitched sounds can make the food taste sweeter
4- if you dye a steak bright blue it really freaks people out
5- we can tell if a liquid is hot or cold by the sound it makes when it’s being poured
6- froot loops are all the same flavor, if you close you eyes, you won’t be able to tell the difference between any of them
7- the background noise on airplanes enhances the taste of umami
8- sour candies are often coated in sugar because rough textures make foods taste more sour
9- looking at pictures of high-calorie foods before eating something will make it taste better
Honestly, grape flavor is pretty spot on to Concord grapes. I used to be a vintner, and I will never forget the first day I had a fresh Concord grape. I literally shouted "THIS IS WHY GRAPE DOESNT TASTE LIKE GRAPE! THIS IS THE GRAPE THEY WERE TALKING ABOUT".
1:28 *The paragraph was:* _A drink that's 10% less sweet but colored red will be perceived as sweeter than one that's not. Potato chip bags are crinkly on purpose because the sound tricks our brains into thinking the chips taste fresher. Low-pitched sounds can make food taste more bitter and high-pitched sounds can make food taste sweeter. If you dye a steak bright blue it reall freaks people out. We can tell whether a liquid is hot or cold by the sound it makes when being poured. Froot loops are all the same flavor. If you close your eyes, you won't be able to tell the difference between any of them. The background noise on airplanes enhances the taste of umami. Sour candies are often coated in sugar because rough textures make foods taste more sour. Looking at pictures of high calorie foods before eating something will make it taste better._ You can see the text for yourself by playing video at 0.25x speed, pausing just to read and rewinding multiple times.
I had grapes a few years ago that tasted exactly like grape candy, and I couldn’t believe it, but I haven’t seen them since
"Candied a rod of uranium" was stellar
I've always noticed that japanese strawberry flavoring had a distinctly different flavor than the artificial strawberry flavor I'm used to. I wonder if japan has a different artificial strawberry flavor?
3:23 I actually really like artificial green apple flavoring.
They can never get the viscosity right for a lot of flavored drinks. It's something you don't really think of but fruit juices aren't like water, they're slightly heavier and stickier, and without that viscosity, it doesn't taste right.
I think (check the label to be sure) the biggest part of the fruit juice is actually applejuice. Making it as thin as water.
Vanilla foods are usually white or yellow colored but the seeds are dark brown
Also,vanilla extract is RED
I've always wondered what would happen if I dyed a steak blue. Good to know
Once I ate really ripe grapes and they did taste like grape artificial flavouring
I am mildly concerned the grapes were rotten.
along with your Switzerland video, this is one of the funniest HAI videos you've ever produced... Good Job, Sam & Team!!!
1:29
Fun facts:
A drink that's 10% less sweet but coloured red will be perceived as sweeter than the one that's not.
Potato chip bags are crinkly on purpose, because the sound tricks our brain into thinking the chips taste fresher.
Low pitched sounds can make food taste more bitter, and high-pitched sounds can make the food taste sweeter.
If you dye a steak bright blue it really freaks people out.
We can tell whether a liquid is hot or cold by the sound it makes when it's being poured.
Fruit loops are all the same flavour. If you close your eyes, you won't be able to tell the difference between any of them.
The background noise on airplanes enhances the taste of umami.
Some candies are often coated in sugar because rough textures make foods taste more sour.
Looking at pictures of high-calorie foods before eating something will make it taste better.
So now the question is: how come artificial flavors developed in Japan taste so much better (that is, closer to their real-life counterparts) than those developed in the US?
Based on so many people preferring artificial flavors, they should just make unique flavors instead of trying to make them taste like other things that taste bad.
"If you dye a steak bright blue it really freaks people out"
-HAI, 2022
1:29 "if you dye a steak bright blue it really freaks people out" 😂😂😂
I’m guessing you read ‘The Dorito Effect’
An excellent book on the whole subject.
Great vid, as always.
Vanillin can be found in oak, which is why wood aged spirits like whiskey contain vanillin.
Wendover Production the next day: The logistics of making Vanilla
Ayy new vid!
Most people don't know this but I used to get good quality inexpensive vanilla beans directly from Madagascar on eBay until around 2011. Then the French came in and I don't know how they did this but they monopolised the bean production there, causing all the direct producer/vendors to disappear from sites like eBay. The prices tripled instantly. I don't know why this was never talked about at the time.
The stock footage guy at 4:20 moves like a fnaf animatronic
"If you dye a steak bright blue it really freaks people out" lmao
The baby comparison had me on the floor laughing 😂
Are you sure about methyl anthranilate used as an artificial flavor before its discovery in grapes? It was described by F. B. Power in 1920 in fruit juices and published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.
Thanks for keeping those amazing standards :)
Hey I watched this video when it came out. I learned today of a sorta correction. Although Madagascar is a large producer of vanilla, it is not native to the island. It’s actually native to Mexico!
Sugestion for a future video: "Why a corpse was crowned queen of Portugal for almost 2 years?"
0:52 OKAY, BANANA LAFFY TAFFY TASTES LIKE GROS MICHEL BANANAS, NOT CAVENDISH, *AND YOU KNOW THIS!*
EXACTLY! oh no I'm a banana nerd now
@@embereatstoasters6835 Welcome, Comrade, to the Banana Nerd Club.
I make vape liquid for myself and strawberry can be extremely difficult to use. There are dozens of different strawberry flavorings from different companies, but to mix up an authentic flavor is hard. Some people can't even taste whatever chemicals are used to make strawberry.
Real vanilla is still much more complex than the fake vanilla.
But you only really notice when it's the stand out flavour in the dish, like in Panna Cotta. The complexity of vanilla gets lost anyway in most dishes, so fake vanilla is often good enough.
But I definitely recommend to everyone to make Panna Contra with real vanilla. Completely changes your view on vanilla
This is full as interesting
3:02 that one kid doing the hype 💀
This came out while watching another half as interesting video. 😊
Grape flavored candy is the reason i didnt actually try real grapes until middle school, i thought "if the sweeter version of this food tastes like THIS what does the actual fruit taste like?!"
its arguably the funniest hai video
I never really understood what these different flavors were. To me, all fruit taste very similar, like with varying levels of sweetness, and bitterness, and whatever else. Maybe it just has to do with me being unable to smell anything.
Oh, you've got anosmia? I had covid and got that, so I understand that feeling of everything tasting the same. Smell is really something most people take for granted.
Fun fact: "Vaina" is spanish for skavard or pod, "Vainilla" is spanish for small pod.
Artificial candy watermelon flavour. Has nothing to do with watermelon but its so damn good
Common misunderstandings are based on the fact that the package labeling of food and other products is misleading when it comes to complexity.
If you compare the list of ingredients from a "natural" product versus its "synthetic" equivalent, the synthetic one will often have the much longer list, giving you the idea that the companies have put a lot of additives in there that are presumably unnecessary and maybe bad for your health.
When in reality, it's quite the opposite. The lists of ingredients on natural products seems shorter because companies are legally allowed to be inaccurate here and replace a list of more than 20 different chemicals with something like "apple". It's like sending invitations for a party, but instead of making a list of all the guest names, you just write down the adress of everyone. If one of these adresses is a very big house with multiple people in it, your short list of invitations might cover up a significantly higher number of actual guests.
The large number of chemicals in natural products are also often handled with little care. If it's known that a plant has a high amount of a toxic chemical in it, this one will be removed in the production process of course. But especially with the minor components, companies just have the tendency to ignore them. And unlike what some religions might tell you, nature doesn't exist for the sole purpose of being used by humans and produces a lot of things that are really not good for you.
On the other hand, if a synthetic product is made from scratch, you can be sure that there is nothing in it that wasn't put in there for a good reason.
Of course, in some cases people will try to mimic something they found in nature and the result will be trash. But you should really get away from this mindset of "right" or "wrong" flavors.
Hey Sam, did you know my pre roll ad for this video was a yogurt with artificial flavourings? You are trying to influence me more than Zuck!
🥳 happy new year
2:08 AYY look it's the phone I had up until like 2 months ago, a midnight black OnePlus 6
I've noticed that we basically have two totally unrelated flavors for every fruit. The real fruit, and the artifical flavor who's only relation seems to be in name. Seems like they tried a lot harder to make it taste similar than I imagined, if I had no idea what a strawberry or banana was and I was given the artificial flavor and the real fruit I would discern no relation between them.
Sam be like "why artificial flavours taste so accurate?" And I am like "whaaaaaaat! They never do, that's why I love fruits but hate everything fruit flavoured"
Finally someone who cover this
This reminds me of a soda I had recently from a somewhat local company. I'd bought a couple different bottles to try, and liked pretty much all of them... up until I got to the black cherry.
Two sips in I very quickly determined that a) they used no small amount of artificial cherry flavor, and thusly b) it was disgusting.
Never have I dumped a bottle of soda as quickly as that. My disappointment was immeasurable.
And then I broke out a cream soda and all was right with the world once more.
Why not dilute the soda with sparkiling water. What a waste of pouring it down the drain...
@@frozenyogurth Because sparkling water is garbage. I like tasting things other than carbon dioxide, thank you.
I didn't know most of the info you skipped over in the star wars fast forward, and it's all genuinely interesting. Kinda surprised you didn't use that material normally.
You're onto something at the end there. I've definitely called things "pleasantly artificial" before.
NileRed tried to turn plastic gloves into grape flavor for soda… it was a huge pain, but did taste like grape soda once added to an estimate of what’s in Kool Aide powder and carbonated water.)
Honest question: could you do this with meat? Both in the "add some to low grade meat to make it better" as well as the "replace meat with something with vaguely the same consistency and artificial flavors" variety?
My brother is an award-winning sommelier, and he believes it's because he was born with a Jacobsen's organ. A small percentage of people have an extra sense from a cluster of nerves located at the juncture where the nose and throat meet, and this gives them super-accurate capacity for discerning flavour. It's s sense which is half-taste and half-smell, being a combination of both.
I would imagine that many volatile aromatic compounds that give fruit their flavor are, well, too volatile and degrade way too quickly. Many of the phenolic compounds of something like an apple can degrade rather quickly, and synthesizing them would be way too expensive compared to actually just extracting them from an apple
Losing my shit at 3:40 😂😂😂 “there’s actually more to it than that”
HEY DON'T BULLY THE GREEN APPLE. Its my favorite flavor of them. Its wrong to bully the flavor of one some of them, Also its not green apple its sour apple. If you want to be honest and/or correct then its (sour green apple) Time stamp: 3:18 - 3:30
We can taste more than five flavour types though. Metallic being one of the more obvious ones that isn't one of the usual five.
The best tea in the world comes from Mauritius and has real Vanilla in it. We found it while visiting the island and still buy it and have it shipped to us in the US.I have seen it for sale in stores in Dubai and once in Europe but never in the US.
Half as interesting: artificial vanilla tastes like vanilla
Me: (slurping my macdonalds vanilla milkshake). I agree 👍🏾
Finally I've been eating industrial coal tar for year and telling people it tastes just like grapes and everyone thinks I'm crazy. Ho's laughing now?
1:41 I like how both stock images use the same actors lol
My Vanilla bean extract in the pantry rn says it’s made with real Madagascar vanilla beans
1:28 A recap of my keycaps clapped: "[space] ......,,....,,....,.....,,,,...,......,,....,,,....,.,,...,. [space]"
I believe that the 5 tastes of sweet, sour, salty, bitter, and umami will be one of those things that we'll look back on years from now and laugh about.
I think you are an original genius. You are to narration what Davinchi was to everything else. A special pick, something that would normally only occur in a population of at least a trillion (your existence is still entirely plausible).
“If you cannot get a bottle of vanilla bean extract directly from the fields of Madagascar, store-bought is fine” (Garten).