OpenCola
github.com
github.com
According to the This American Life episode [2] where they made a batch, the taste testers were able to detect real Coke 28 out of 30 times. So maybe it's not a perfect match! Still, it's cool.
0: https://github.com/cognitom/OpenCola/blob/master/recipe.mark...
1: https://cube-cola.org/index.php?route=information/informatio...
[0] https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20160922-the-nut-that-hel...
INGREDIENTS: CARBONATED WATER, HIGH FRUCTOSE CORN SYRUP, CARAMEL COLOR, PHOSPHORIC ACID, NATURAL FLAVORS, CAFFEINE.
Things like fruit concentrates can't be listed as natural flavors, because they're still the actual full fruit.
(The most popular one was that KFC had started using initials for its name because its chicken had similarly been so "engineered" they weren't legally allowed to call it chicken... 100% false, of course.)
There was apparently some flak because their technology used a human embryonic stem cell line in the flavor development process.
I’m not sure the link below will mention the qualification for “natural flavor” labeling, but I recall that flavors derived from yeast fermentation - even if the yeast are genetically engineered to produce specific compounds - qualify because fermentation is a “natural” process.
There are tons of flavor formulations I'd love to know - not because I'm a chemist or a food scientist but just out of sheer curiosity and the desire to learn how stuff is made.
I wish people would research other flavors, e.g.:
* Bubblegum
* Tutti Fruitti
* Irn-Bru
Once I bought “cinnamon spread” and it didn’t have cinnamon in the ingredients. The company refused to tell me if “natural flavors” included cinnamon. (I’m sure it did because cinnamon is cheap, but c’mon).
And yeah, a lot of alcohol products get exempted from ingredient labelling for some reason. Should be treated like food is.
https://www.amazon.ca/Imperial-Cinnamon-Spread-250g/dp/B00FO...
Buddy they're substituting lead for cinnamon in applesauce to save a penny or two. Cheap doesn't matter at scale if you can find a way to go cheaper.
I miss Dr Pepper too, with aspartame or that other chemic it's just not the same.
Girders
Aspartame (or sugar for orig flavour)
Water(?)
They had different recipes for the same flavor depending on the usage. For example, ranch chip powder and ranch dip would have different ingredients and cooking instructions.
Also that had so many different ways just to make vanilla flavoring depending on the customer's needs. So two soda makers might use different artificial vanilla flavorings.
For natural ingredients, you can usually just google the name of it plus "gcms" and get a list of known compounds in it with percentages.
Not an easy profession or hobby to get into, though.
I wonder why that's not the case.
All of the recreations that you can find readily available online and through videos "come close" or are "their own thing, but pretty decent," etc. At best, what we think we know of Coca-Cola is some long historic recipe that hasn't been used for decades.
'TAL' calls for FE Coca, Alcohol, and Vanilla but 'colawp' does not.
1: https://github.com/mmichelli/Coca-Cola/compare/master...cogn...
It was intended to ween me off Coke, but, I'm sad to say that Coke won. I didn't bother purchasing another batch when we finished the first one. I instead graduated to buying the mini cans of Coke rather than the full-sized ones.
You're a better person than I—I find those mini cans frustratingly unsatisfying.
Open Cola - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12546439 - Sept 2016 (66 comments)
OpenCola Soft Drink - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5809564 - June 2013 (35 comments)
Open Source Cola - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2057321 - Jan 2011 (14 comments)
But they don't want to make Coca-Cola, they want to make Pepsi.
There is a conspiracy theory that 1987s introduction of new coke (in which all old coke was pulled from the market) was actually to cover up the taste difference when they switched from using sugar to high fructose corn syrup. When old coke came back people didn't notice the change as much.
You can still get Coke made with sugar (Mexico) give it a try and make up your own mind.
Coca-Cola has special privileges to import raw coca leaves. They extract the cocaine (which is then sold for pharmaceutical use). The mostly-cocaine free extract is then used to flavor their cola. AFAIK Coca-Cola is the only entity in the US allowed to do this, so it is unsurprising that other cola brands taste significantly different.
We know that sodium consumption can be drastically reduced by adding salt at table rather than adding it directly to food. Why doesn't this happen with sugar? Why not make desserts that take advantage of the fact that surface sugar will make it seem to be sweeter than it actually is and just have table sugar?
And dessert basically goes the same way -- I honestly can't even imagine what something like a cherry pie would be if it were cooked without sugar, and then you were expected to dump sugar on top. But it would not be good.
The reason a chef "knows this" is because if you judged their food with or without salt, the salt one would win, so in the end they're required to add waaay to much salt, when the tongue just needs those surface crystals.
Healthier to salt after, and therefore cook your own food.
It does not, and that can (and has been!) be empirically shown. Salt gets into the food and changes both chemical properties and how it responds to cooking. Pre-seasoned meats, for example, are more tender.
If you prefer to salt at the table, by all means, eat your food however you like it, but it is simply false to claim that there's no difference or "chefs just add too much salt".
It's not. Unless you have hypertension or some other medical condition around salt, there's no reason to restrict your salt intake.
For the average person, the level of salt in restaurant food has no unhealthy effects whatsoever. Amounts in excess of your daily requirement are simply excreted in urine.
Many athletes especially in very hot climates need high sodium, sometimes up to 8 grams a day.
1) Care about their customers' health, which they have no reason to
2) Be willing to risk brand damage by exposing how much sugar is in their garbage
3) Be willing to "burden" users with the task of adding sugar which isn't "convenient"
It's far easier to just feed people garbage while you're making $$$
Some people like rituals with their addiction.
Seeing the sugar being added may create the perception of more sweetness than there is. (But also guilt, so it can go both ways).
I'm aware that aspartame isn't ideal, but I'm not brave enough to give up sweet-tasting beverages yet. :-)
Back then I was also packing lunches for my wife, and she wanted a bottle of commercial fruit juice to have with lunch. We'd buy a large bottle to save money and pour some into a smaller bottle for transport. I mentioned my experiment and she said "I'd like it if you had me try it with the juice" -- so I started doing it. A few days later she brought it up again, "Can we start diluting my juice I'm taking in?" and I told her she'd already been having diluted juice.
These days I fall into "water is the real adult beverage" but I always keep in mind just how sweet things are commonly made.
We have a 1st-gen Coke freestyle machine in my workplace. On the rare occasion I go for it, I pick a zero-sugar variant, and I dilute it with 50% sparkling water otherwise every single flavor is way, WAY too sweet for me.
Like coffee: I like a hint of sweet in my espresso, but Cola is like dumping 4-5 spoons in a small cup of coffee. Becomes sugar syrup and that's all one can taste anymore.
Because undiluted coca cola is just honestly not very good, and extremely uh, I'm not sure how to put it, practically pungent
They definitely have not. You just like sugary things better as a kid.
It's kind of like, the summer camp I went to as a kid, and recently revisited as an adult -- they shrunk all the buildings and fields in size by half! Or so it certainly seemed, I could have sworn...
I can't eat the candy I ate as a kid either. Now, 85% dark chocolate on the other hand...
The water/sugar ratio for the OpenCola syrup is nearly 1:1, which is the same ratio as simple syrup [1].
0: https://github.com/cognitom/OpenCola/blob/master/recipe.mark...
No matter how bad you think artificial zero calorie sweeteners are, they are nothing compared to the damage that too much sugar does to your body.
Refined sugar is certainly not good for you, but a 12oz can of Coke - is 140 calories. That's about 6% of the recommended daily caloric intake.
Calories RDI is about 2000-2500 for most people. But most Americans eat more like 3000-3500 and don't exercise.
You can drink a 12 oz can of Coke every day and it's not even a blip on the radar. (A 64 oz tub of it, of course, is a different story.) What people need to do to be healthy is not overeat by 1,000 calories a day while never exercising. That combo will send you to an early grave, the can of Coke in a diet that otherwise hits the right macros, will not.
Only that blood sugar levels also affect hunger, psyche etc.
So no, you cannot just sum up calories in that case.
When I drink Coke, it becomes the primary way I hydrate. So five, six cans a day is not uncommon.
I can't speak for everyone, but I've known plenty of other people who end each workday with 5+ cans of Coke on their desk.
Personally, when I was drinking coke regularly, I was >30% body fat. Now that I've cut Coke completely from my diet, I am ~15%.
Honestly though, I would love for these facts to not be true for me. I miss Coke dearly. It's my favorite drink.
% of Caloric RDI isn't the whole story. A can of Coke is less of a blip on the radar as you suggested.
[0] https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/carbohydrates/a...
I'm surprised this is not common knowledge, but I guess people in general don't read labels.
plain granulated white table sugar: 2.36 kg
J. Kenji Lopez-Alt did a study where he concluded that people who think they like Mexican Coke more than Regular Coke simply enjoy tasting Coke out of a glass, and the perceived cane-sugar vs HFCS may just be a placebo:
https://www.seriouseats.com/coke-vs-mexican-coke
But YMMV. Even having read that study, I still prefer Mexican Coke.
Even if a placebo, it's still true - I can't stand canned coke. I can't drink it, the taste to me is horrible.
If all your brain/tongue perceives as horrible is the taste of the aluminum can, you could always switch to buying Coke in glass bottles, which are more expensive than cans but still cheaper to buy in bulk than Mexican Cokes, and can be found at most grocery stores.
Or, if being limited to Mexican Coke means it reduces your overall soda consumption because you're only able to drink it when you're near a Home Depot, keep doing what you're doing. You'll probably be healthier for it.
Or just pour it in a glass?
You're assuming that the taste is only affected by what it's being served in, not how the liquid was transported. For all we know, aluminum imparts some sort of off-flavor into the Coke itself that the OP doesn't like, in which case it wouldn't matter if he decants it into a glass first--it would already have been "tainted" by being held in the aluminum can.
I also can't stand plastic bottled sodas, and can tell they've been sitting in one even if drank out of something else after opening.
I fear the bottling/canning process and length of time spent in it gives it a bit of a whiskey-barrel style finishing taste alteration.
And twice as much caffeine per ml.
Mexican Coke doesn't use cane sugar anymore. But when it did, I'd read that the sucrose in peak-era Mexican Coke broke down into a HFCS-similar mix of fructose and glucose in the drink's acidity anyway.
I'm convinced the Mexican Coke thing is just some hipster thing, and Coca-Cola is glad to exploit it.
I think the real differentiator is drinking out of a glass bottle vs. a can.
There definitely is a subtle difference. I was about to pick out the different drink reliably. It's just hard to imagine the difference is make-or-break between enjoying and intolerable for anyone. And it less likely comes from the sweetener and more from the Mexican water versus the water at your local Coca-Cola bottler.
West coast Coke vs East coast Coke would be an interesting test I've never thought about doing.
In contrast, using 15% ethanol uses 15% less gas at a time when we were desperately trying to not be held by the balls by the middle east gas sellers, it's trivial to produce at scale, it was a simple handout to corn growers, which the US cares deeply about, and refineries didn't mind that it reduced the energy density of fuel by a couple percent, requiring you buy more gas for the same amount of energy, and it would never end up with a 60 minutes special about how it has been poisoning all of us for decades. We should have been using it the whole damn time.
For bottled Coke, HCFS Coke and Mexican/Kosher Coke taste similar but not the same: HCFS Coke has stronger/bolder (one-note type of) sweetness but sugar Coke has a broader sweetness.
All versions of regular Pepsi have a cloying aftertaste.