![]() For a hint of that creamy sweetness in a dessert-like chocolate chip cookies, which has more flavors to balance out the vanilla, artificial extract is suitable. It’s great for desserts like ice cream or cupcake frosting, in which the vanilla flavor will stand out. The aromatic, sweet, and musky flavor is creamy and complex. Natural vanilla extract from a country like Madagascar is the highest quality. Single source natural vanilla extract will always be labeled with its country of origin. You might also notice that some companies, like McCormick, use labels like “pure vanilla extract.” This term signifies that the vanilla extract in the bottle is natural, but it’s likely a mixture of vanilla from different sources. However, natural vanilla also comes from Mexico, China, and Tahiti. ![]() Cured and fermented beans are ground up and soaked in alcohol and water to create the liquid extract you find at the grocery store.Īccording to Le, Madagascar and Indonesia produce the majority of the world’s vanilla, a combined 6,000 metric tons every year. Natural vanilla extract comes from the vanilla orchid, which, when pollinated, produces a pod containing vanilla beans. Natural vanilla extract can be found at the grocery store and will likely be labeled with the country from which it was sourced, but it tends to cost more (some bottles run for as much as $22). However, real natural vanilla extract comes directly from the vanilla bean. ![]() Instead, it’s used to flavor foods like ice cream. Vanilla extract made from yeast or fungi won’t appear in the baking aisle. Because it comes from an organism, under federal regulations, you can call it natural flavoring.” “You can genetically engineer the yeast to basically transform sugar into vanilla flavor. ![]() “You can also produce vanilla from fungi, like yeast,” Le says. About 85 percent of the world’s synthetic vanillin, or 18,000 metric tons every year, is produced this way, writes Le.Īny vanilla extract made from the petrochemical process has to be called imitation or artificial vanilla extract, and you can easily find bottles of vanilla extract made using this process at the grocery store. Typically, two chemicals are combined to create vanillylmandelic acid, which, when it reacts to oxygen, produces synthetic vanillin, the main ingredient in imitation vanilla. How artificial vanilla extract is actually madeĪccording to Le, it’s much more likely that artificial vanilla is made by refining petrochemicals. “That’s the trick that flavor companies use to hide the origins,” he says. Because the secretion is an animal product, it could fall under the “natural flavoring” label. But even if you have an ancient bottle of vanilla extract hiding in the back of your cabinets or a frostbitten tub of vanilla ice cream you never bothered to throw away, Le says there’s no guarantee that the ingredient label would specify that it contains castoreum. Today, there’s no reason to believe that the artificial vanilla extract you bought at the grocery store contains castoreum. “It’s really gone out style,” Bryan Quoc Le, a food scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, tells me. Any pearl-clutching articles you may have run across spreading panic that there’s beaver butt oil in your food are greatly exaggerated. “All five unanimously stated that castoreum is not used today in any form of vanilla sold for human food use” and that it’s more common use is in fragrances. Going farther back, in 2011, one vegetarian non-profit asked five companies that produce natural and artificial vanilla if they used castoreum in their products. Since at least 2013, only 300 pounds of castoreum have been produced annually. The entire experience sounds unappetizing (would you really want to use castoreum on your food after witnessing where it comes from?) and uncomfortable, for the beaver in particular. First the beaver must be anesthetized and the castor gland “milked” to produce the secretion. According to National Geographic, the process is complex and invasive. The biggest challenge to processing castoreum for use in food is that it’s challenging to harvest, as you might imagine. Castoreum is rarely used to flavor food anymore, and even if it were, the FDA has ruled that it poses no health risk. Don’t rush into your kitchen and purge all your vanilla extract from your cabinets or toss your vanilla ice cream from the freezer, though. The properties of castoreum have made it a popular additive in perfumes and to enhance vanilla, strawberry, and raspberry flavors in foods like ice cream and yogurt. Thanks to a diet of tree bark, the goo has a musky fragrance similar to natural vanilla. In nature, beavers use castoreum to mark their territory. The castor gland, located underneath the beaver’s tail distressingly close to the anus, produces a slimy brown substance called castoreum.
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