I've been trying to diversify my homemade beverage selection lately which has meant branching out into a few different flavoured syrups. Bottles of vanilla syrup and peppermint syrup are stupidly expensive in stores - think $10-15 for a 750 ml bottle - but incredibly easy / cheap to make. (To make about a cup and a half: add 1 cup water and 1 cup sugar to a pan. Heat until the sugar dissolves - no need to stir though apparently it speeds up the process. Then add about 2 tsp of whatever extract to the results once it's cooled down).
Once thing that I've known for a while is that in blind taste test results from, e.g., Cook's Country / America's Test Kitchen and Serious Eats artificial vanilla tests to score well in a lot of tests and thus it's the kind that I've tended to keep around. What I found with my first batch of vanilla syrup was that it tasted good but got a bit boring gradually throughout the course of drinking a latte made with it. I repeated with some real vanilla extract and got better results. It seems that my impressions were similar to those of tasters in the Cook's Country article I found today:
In cake, the pure vanilla came out on top but just a hair ahead of the high-ranking imitation. In cookies, the pure vanilla dropped to last place, and that high-ranking imitation soared to first place. As it turns out, flavor and aroma compounds in vanilla begin to bake off at around 280 to 300 degrees. Cakes rarely exceed an internal temperature above 210 degrees; cookies become much hotter as they bake. ... Speaking to pastry chefs, we learned that many buy an arsenal of vanilla extracts, using cheaper imitation for baking and pure for confections made with moderate or no heat, such as puddings, pastry cream, and buttercream frosting.
Thus I think I'll probably keep buying both artificial and real vanilla extract, using one or the other depending on the application.
I've been debating recently playing around with more type of oils - finishing oils - and was debating whether or not I should buy some truffle oil, as such things are supposed to have an interesting flavour. I discovered via a New York Times article that something similar to the artificial vs. real question in vanilla also applies to this realm:
When I discovered truffle oil as a chef in the late 1990’s, I was thrilled. So much flavor, so little expense. ... I happily used truffle oil for several years (even, embarrassingly, recommending it in a cookbook), until finally a friend cornered me at a farmers’ market to explain what I had should have known all along. ... That truffle oil is chemically enhanced is not news. It has been common knowledge among most chefs for some time, and in 2003 Jeffrey Steingarten wrote an article in Vogue about the artificiality of the oils that by all rights should have shorn the industry of its “natural” fig leaf. Instead, the use of truffle oil continued apace. The question is, Why are so many chefs at all price points — who wouldn’t dream of using vanillin instead of vanilla bean and who source their organic baby vegetables and humanely raised meats with exquisite care — using a synthetic flavoring agent? Part of the answer is that, even now, you will find chefs who are surprised to hear that truffle oil does not actually come from real truffles.
So in other words he thought it was awesome until someone told him that virtually all of the stuff that's out there is somewhat artificial. You're talking about a flavouring agent that accounts for a relatively small percentage of the total dish. Is artificial stuff bad for you? Sometimes perhaps. But what then of, e.g., sous vide cooking becoming popular in restaurants and in molecular gastronomy? Is seems a bit hard to dub a cooking method where you want a vacuum sealer and cook in plastic bags is hard to consider anything other than a bit artificial. (It's also heat that seems to promote chemicals like BPA leeching from plastic and it seems that sous vide may be impacted by this).
