Flavoring Agents

Flavoring Agents
Flavoring agents are the largest single group of food additives. Food and beverage applications of flavors include dairy, fruit, nut, seafood, spice blends, vegetables and wine flavoring agents. They may complement, magnify, or modify the taste and aroma of the foods.

There are over 1200 different flavoring agents used in foods to create flavor or replenish flavors lost or diminished in processing, and hundreds of chemicals may be used to simulate nature flavors. Alcohols, esters, aldehydes, ketones, protein hydrolysates and MSG are examples of flavoring agents.

Natural flavoring substances are extracted from plants, herbs and spices, animals, or microbial fermentations. They also include essential oils and oleoresins (created by solvent extract with solvent removed), herbs, spices and sweetness.

Synthetic flavoring agents are chemically similar to natural flavorings, and offer increased consistency in use and availability. They may be less expensive and more readily available than the natural counterpart although they may not adequately simulate the natural flavor. Some examples of synthetic flavoring agents include amyl acetate, used as banana flavoring benzaldehyde, used to create cherry or almond flavor, ethyl butyrate for pineapple, methyl anthranilate for grape, methyl salicylate for wintergreen flavor, and fumaric acid, which is an ideal source of tartness and acidity in dry foods.

Flavor enhancers such as monosodium glutamate (MSG) intensify or “bring out,” enhance or supplement the flavor of other compounds in food; they have a taste outside of the basic sweet, sour, salty or bitter. Monosodium glutamate was chemically derived from seaweed in the early 1900s, but is manufactured commercially by the fermentation of starch, molasses, or sugar.
Flavoring Agents

Flavors and Colors of Softdrinks: The History

Flavors and Colors of Softdrinks: The History
Original carbonates were artificial imitations of naturally occurring mineral waters. Manufactures blended mineral salts in the same proportions as found in the natural spring waters and added carbonated water. A large range of such waters was available during the early 1800s. Early attempts at producing flavored products were limited by a lack of stable flavoring and spoilage problems.

The flavoring materials used consisted mainly of herbal/botanical extracts, for example, ginger, nettle, nutmeg, horehound, lemon oil, vanilla etc., but the technology for manufacture of soluble stable flavoring extracts develop rapidly during the middle of the century with the establishment around this time of many specialty flavor companies.

An early recipe for lemonade consisted of citric acid essential oil of lemon and sugar syrup, the mixture being topped up with water and impregnated with carbon dioxide – instantly recognizable as the forerunner of today’s lemonade.

By the second half of the century, carbonate manufacturers could buy a very comprehensive range of flavors to use in their products and the science of flavor chemistry as well under way. As demonstrated by the development of artificial vanilla by Tiemann and Wallach in 1872. This reduced the cost of vanilla flavor by factor of more than x30.

Many of the popular drinks of today were on sale before 1900. The quantity of CO2 added to a drink has a pronounced effect upon its clear character and flavor impact. The solubility of CO2 in water decreases as temperature increases but increases with increasing pressure, that is, a given level of carbonation will generate a higher pressure as the temperature increases. Ice cold water (0 degree C) will dissolve 1.7 volumes (3.4 g/l) of CO2 at atmospheric pressure.

At CO2 levels and at temperatures above this, increased pressure must be applied to retain the CO2 in solution. In some of his early highly carbonated waters Nicholas Paul used carbonations of up to eight volumes of CO2 (16 g/l): however, the usual carbonation levels now range from about two volumes for a slightly sparkling fruit drinks to around five volumes for a mixer drink such as tonic water.

In the early 1800s, colors were restricted to mainly variants of brown and red that is, those which could be produced from caramel or cochineal. This remained the case until the introduction of synthetic aniline dyes around 1880. In 1885 the manufacturing of some colors from vegetable extracts but that there was a trend for these to be replaced by the new aniline-based dyes, even though these are considered objectionably by many. It also strongly warned manufacturers not to use colors such as arsenic sulphate, lead chromate, mercury sulphate and copper arsenite, which it claimed were sometimes used to color confectionary.
Flavors and Colors of Softdrinks: The History

Garlic

Garlic
Botanically name Allium sativum, L. Because of their attractive flavor and acknowledged medicinal properties the bulb or “cloves” of garlic have been used in the cuisine of most Mediterranean countries since the dawn of history.

Like onions the entire cloves are almost without odor but once cut or bruised they produce an intensity strong and characteristics odor which too many is obnoxious.

The chemistry of the compounds responsible for the garlic profile is similar to the found in onion. The differences are attributed to qualitative and quantitative differences in the precursors present; the active ingredients being primarily allyl (2-propenyl) sulfides together with much smaller amounts of methyl and 1-prophykl compounds.

The flavor of onion and garlic is complementary the former being mild and sweet whereas the latter is harsh and insistent, because of its relatively high flavoring power, garlic is frequently blended with onion in order to increase the initial impact of the onion but this can only be done to a very limited extent as garlic is quickly recognizable as such and its flavor associations are not always acceptable.

If garlic is incorporated into an end product which is to be distributed in a container such as a screw capped bottle or jar, the head space above the product nearly always has a higher proportion of the garlic odor.

This may be detectable as such and detract from the product even though the product itself may not contain a sufficient level of garlic to be noticeable when the product is consumed.
Garlic