Meet the Molecule That Smells Like Pancakes and Set Off Emergency Investigations in NYC

Late on the evening of October 28, 2005, and early into the subsequent morning, New York Metropolis’s 311 service hotline was flooded with calls reporting an odd odor wafting throughout Manhattan. Giant swaths of the island smelled like maple syrup and no person knew why.

Was it terrorism? A stunt from the Eggo folks? A sneak-attack by sentient maple bushes?

NYPD, NYFD, and NYC’s emergency administration and environmental safety businesses launched an investigation that decided the odor was innocent, but it surely did not establish a supply. The odor disappeared, and life went on. Till it popped up once more sooner or later in March 2006. And once more that November. And once more a 12 months after that. Then-hit TV present 30 Rock even made a joke in regards to the mysterious odor.

It took virtually 4 years of sporadic fragrant occasions to lastly remedy the thriller: The maple syrup odor got here from a manufacturing unit in New Jersey processing fenugreek. Typically referred to as by its Hindi identify, methi, fenugreek’s seeds and leaves might be present in stews and spice mixes all through many of the assorted regional cuisines of India and Pakistan.

However even an skilled Indian chef has hassle describing precisely what methi tastes like by itself. “My recommendation is, don’t style it. It’s bitter!” laughs Pawan Mahendro, proprietor and chef of Badmaash, which he opened in Los Angeles in 2013 along with his two sons. Mahendro grew up in Punjab, in northern India, the place methi seeds usually go into pickles. “My grandmother would do plenty of pickling, and we might at all times play with the methi seeds. One time she stated, ‘chew this.’ I chewed on some and so they had been so bitter I by no means needed to style them once more!” he says. “That was my first reminiscence of methi.”

Since then, Mahendro’s spent 50 years within the restaurant enterprise—in India, Canada, and the US—and altered his thoughts about methi. At one Toronto restaurant, he was in command of making house-cured salmon for brunch and experimented with plenty of completely different components. One mixture of lemon, dill, and methi was particularly fashionable. “It turned out to be very flavorful,” he remembers. “Individuals began asking, ‘What’s completely different about this?’ However no person might pick why.”

Maple syrup, although? Kinda. “After I roast and powder methi, it has a sweetish form of taste however there’s a bitter ending to it,” Mahendro says. “Possibly like a powerful, darkish caramel, sure.”

The molecule chargeable for each methi and the Manhattan Maple Whodunit is sotolon (typically spelled with an “e” on the finish—”sotolone”), which is current in fenugreek in giant portions and pops up in all kinds of different surprising locations. “I’ve used it in banana, pumpkin, elderflower, strawberry, and peach flavors,” says Kim Juelg, a principal flavorist for Givaudan, the world’s largest maker of flavorings and smells. After 25 years working her means up by the ranks of the corporate and coaching in tasting and chemistry, she’s now in command of formulating savory, candy, and beverage flavors for manufacturers you’ve positively heard of, however which she’s not allowed to call. (For those who see “pure flavors” or “synthetic flavors” on an components record, there’s a superb probability Givaudan made them.)

Juelg describes sotolon as a “candy, brown” molecule that you just’d probably discover in chemical facsimiles of issues like molasses, caramel, and, sure, maple syrup. In comparison with different components flavorists have at hand, sotolon is kind of costly, so it’s sometimes used along with different, extra inexpensive chemical compounds. Your pumpkin spice drinks, and granola bars, and candies, and candles, are made with a mixture of molecules that will embrace sotolon, too.

Sotolon is a lactone, which has a really particular definition associated to molecular construction that’s means too sophisticated to speak about right here. However for taste functions, lactones are typically oily, and don’t dissolve effectively in water. Meaning their scents linger: When Juelg makes use of sotolon at work, it “sticks” to her pores and skin and garments for much longer than, say, banana-flavored isoamyl acetate, which evaporates and washes away fairly readily. “I’ve left work, gone to the grocery on my means house, and whereas in line have heard folks say, ‘Do you odor pancakes?’” she remembers. “Even after showering, you’re gonna odor it for a couple of days.”

Sotolon’s texture additionally makes it helpful for the elusive part of taste referred to as mouthfeel. It “tastes” form of thick, if that makes any sense. “The oiliness of lactones simply lays there and sticks in your tongue,” Juelg says. “We use them rather a lot for ‘fleshiness’ in strawberry or espresso. Stuff you’re making an attempt to offer a fuller mouthfeel with out being candy.” In contrast to molecules that evaporate shortly and also you style on the “entrance” of the palate, you style these “mid-to-finish,” she says.

Sotolon’s “heavy” stickiness and gradual evaporation is the way it was capable of blow throughout the Hudson, however the purpose so many individuals observed the maple odor is that it’s particularly potent. Individuals can style it at concentrations of .02 elements per million, which is 2000 occasions as potent as vanillin (because the identify suggests, a serious part of vanilla taste), one other “candy, brown” molecule Juelg works with ceaselessly.

With an necessary position in each curries and faux caramels and syrups, sotolon atomically bridges the divide between candy and savory. And among the different pure sources of the chemical do the identical. Yow will discover plenty of sotolon in sweet cap mushrooms, which cooks usually flip into ice cream or caramels, in addition to within the oxidized minerality of sherry and different barrel-aged wines and spirits, and within the toasty sweetness of cigar tobacco. Homebrewers typically add fenugreek to their beer to supply a delicate maple taste with out including sugar. And there’s even a connection to funny-smelling pee: Victims of a uncommon genetic dysfunction referred to as maple syrup urine illness can’t course of sure amino acids correctly, main, by a sequence of chemical steps, to sotolon—and its distinctive odor—of their excretions. (The illness is often identified in infants whose mother and father odor, effectively, maple syrup urine, and it may be deadly but it surely’s pretty simply handled by regulating amino acids within the eating regimen.)

So the subsequent time you’re wandering the streets and get an awesome whiff of maple syrup (assuming you’re not in Vermont in early spring), search for a spice manufacturing unit or an Indian restaurant—no have to name the police.

October 2020