Synthesizing Chicken Noodle Soup From Pure Chemicals

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How many chemicals does is take to make chicken soup? Today we find out.

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Original Patent: https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/ef/9e/e4/81fcd06474f18a/US3689289.pdf

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This video is made possible by Squarespace this is roast chicken available at most local grocery stores it’s the Flesh of a dead bird heated enough to denature the proteins and Char and caramelize many of the starting chemicals or as you’d probably just say delicious and cooked through but if I

Were to ask you what it was made of you might be a bit confused chicken is seen as a base ingredient so the idea that it’s made of component parts feels weird if you were to reply that it’s made of muscle fat bone and connective tissue

I’d reply well what are those made of one step down and you’re forced to just start listing off a gargantuan list of chemicals proteins minerals and metals and very quickly it starts to sound like your Edward Elric reciting the ingredients for an alchemical transmutation what’s that it’s all the

Ingredients of the average adult human body down to the last specks of protein in your eyelashes but when you talk about the taste of chicken how many of those ingredients are actually necessary your sense of taste can’t actually discern everything single ingredient and lots of the chemicals that may be

Present exist below the threshold you can taste so aren’t worth worrying about so if we combined all the chemicals individually and a source of protein then cooked it would we get the taste of chicken not only is the answer a resounding yes the results may actually be better than the original and the

Chemistry is so easy it’s not only something you can absolutely do and try at home I encourage you to do so as it is truly delicious but you’re not going to need to take my word for it We’ve ran a double-blind taste test with some of

My friends which you’ll see later and I think it really shows just how good this stuff is the idea started when I noticed that my favorite cheap brand of ramen wasn’t actually made of real chicken and I wondered how that was even possible this led down a long rabbit hole that

Ended in U.S patent number 3689289 titled chicken flavor and process for preparing the same let me read you some Snippets from the patent in accordance with the invention an artificial chicken flavor composition is provided which is capable of developing the flavor of chicken when heated in the

Presence of water for five to ten minutes at temperatures within the range from 60 to 90 degrees Celsius accordingly this composition is well suited for use by quote a housewife who merely Heats it at the time of use and then can use it at once without any need

For storage after the chicken flavor has been developed it probably doesn’t come as a surprise that the patent was originally filed in the 60s but because of that the information contained within is now in use by practically every food manufacturer in the world because of this in related patents the secrets of

Making meaty flavors has been well understood for decades and it Delights me to share these Arcane secrets with you when I first tried the recipe straight out of the patent I was shocked at how good it was that one’s really good but it did take a little bit of messing

With it to make it truly amazing and it felt like I had just found the recipe for something you shouldn’t be able to make like a recipe for the color red or the feeling of anui but when you understand the mechanics you can shift the flavor to mimic any meaty flavor you

Want or just make the best vegetable broth you’ve ever had so let’s get right into it and see how this works one of the nice things about biology is that evolution is immensely lazy if something works well enough there’s not going to be a lot of pressure to change it case

In point you share 70 of the same DNA with a banana if your DNA was only one percent different you’d be a dolphin I must speak with the dolphins now Anyway the result of this is that most living things on earth share the same base fundamentals proteins DNA and various salts so we have a lot of non-chicken options for ingredients to provide a lot of the base components that are the foundation of the flavor

And then we’ll only need to add a few meat specific ones to fine-tune The Taste in this case as you might expect we go with what you’ll find in pretty much any vegetarian or vegan meat substitute soy protein soy protein is nice because it’s a pretty bland flavor

But it has a similar amino acid composition to meat in this case I’m using defatted soy protein which I got at the grocery store as textured vegetable protein though the first step is to detexture it in a blender before we go further we need to talk about the

Sense of taste and how it works since we’re trying to recreate a specific taste having an understanding of how the Machinery works is super important and you will get the bonus of instantly becoming a better Chef by understanding this mechanism though if this trick does

Make you a better Chef you might get so good that you’ll want to sell your delicious Creations in that case you’re going to need a website and for that look no further than the sponsor of this video Squarespace Squarespace is the all-in-one platform that makes it super

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Your site go to squarespace.com the thought Emporium to save 10 off your first purchase of a website or domain and of course there’s some links below now back to science anyway the standard story of how taste works is that we only have five types of taste receptor sweet

Sour salty bitter and Umami or savory this isn’t the full reality but it’s a good place to start we can break those types of taste into two groups the first group which includes salty and sour are detecting changes to the properties of the solution in this case sour is

Affecting pH and salty is detecting well salinity this second group contains the rest of the tastes and these are looking for groups of specific types of chemical sweet is supposed to be detecting sugars but all sorts of things can set it off that aren’t actually Sugar bitter is

Typically said to be for detecting alkaloids and things that might be poisonous and Umami is detecting things like MSG and other Savory chemicals now the reason I group them like that is because that’s actually how it’s divided up in taste buds your tongue is covered in taste buds but you can’t see them

With the naked eye the little squishy hair like pads that cover the tongue are papillae though they often get confused with taste buds the buds themselves are embedded in the sides of the pads with anywhere from three to one hundred buds per papillae depending on the type if we

Look at a single taste bud we find that it’s made of anywhere from three to four different cell types and it really does look like a little flower Bud which is where they get their name type 3 cells detect sour and salty type 2 cells do everything else and type 1 cells are

Glial cells that help keep the system stable by isolating the different receptor cells and cleaning up neurotransmitters they release though each type 2 cell will specialize in one specific type of taste be it Sweet Bitter or umami then there’s a basal population of stem cells that replenish

The system as the cells get damaged to maintain a healthy taste bud there’s a little pore on the top of the bud that allows a sample of the mixture to enter and be analyzed by the various cells depending on which cells are set off a series of nerves picks up those signals

And sends them up to the brain for analysis something you may notice is that each taste bud has all of the taste types mixed together if you’re like me you probably saw this picture in science class and we’re taught that the different types of tastes were localized

To different areas of the tongue but it turns out that couldn’t have been further from the truth the last part of the classic story of taste is actually smell as the story goes all of the sensation of taste is just the ratio of the five different base tastes and any

Extra information we get comes from the smell of the components as we chew and swallow as gas is forced up the back end of the nose the nose samples it and sends information about the volatile components of the mixture up to the brain the brain then combines the two

Streams of data into the sensation of taste the problem though is that if you’ve spent any time in a kitchen you might notice that there are some specific things missing in this picture of how taste works and it doesn’t really match the experience of taste first off

We’re missing a few types of taste these include the detection of oils and fats and importantly what the Japanese have named kokumi or richness the specific mechanism by which these and some of the other types of taste are detected is still a little bit blurry but there is

Enough evidence to point to that we know that these are distinct things the tongue is detecting kokumi or richness for example is detecting short broken pieces of proteins that tend to form when you either cook something for a long time or when things are fermented which is why those processes make food

Taste so good and yes if you isolate those peptides you can just add it to food to instantly make it taste rich but this is also the secret to why things like fish sauce soy sauce and other fermented Goods or stews and things that have been cooked for a really long time

Time tastes so good the other problem with the classic idea of taste is that it’s presented as if the tongue just has five levers and it’s simply measuring the intensity of each but this couldn’t be further from the truth instead of levers I prefer to think of each type of

Taste as an instrument each instrument can play a wide variety of notes and combination of notes but all are related by the type of instrument playing those notes the reason for this is because the taste cells are actually much more complicated than the simple picture of their function would imply first off the

Actual protein complexes that are responsible for detecting the various types of taste aren’t single entities for example the complex that detects bitter compounds is called task 2R but there are about 25 different task 2R complexes that we know of that each detect a different variety of bitter compounds each bitter detecting cell

Doesn’t Express all of the different versions the distribution also isn’t homogeneous across the tongue instead each cell will pick a random few of these to express so no individual taste buds will be sending much more specific information about what they’re tasting by doing this the brain can much more

Easily discern between different bitter compounds as different compounds will set off different patterns of taste buds across the tongue and it’s much more like the tongue is taking very wet pictures of whatever it’s coming in contact with the brain learns to pick out different chemicals it experiences and mixtures of chemicals from these

Patterns on top of that it’s recently been found that not only do taste cells Express a heterogeneous population of taste receptors they also Express a heterogeneous population of olfactory receptors as well which means the same type of sensor that was thought to only be found in the nose so yes you’re

Smelling with your tongue and this is another way that the patterns of taste buds firing are modulated to pull out more information about what you’re tasting now a cell will fire either when a bitter compound is detected or a specific smelling chemical so to bring it back to the music analogy if each

Type of taste is an instrument making something delicious isn’t just about balancing the levels of the different tastes its mixing and matching notes on the different instruments to make a more cohesive Melody and thinking of it this way is especially necessary if you’re trying to fake a particular taste that’s

As complex as something like chicken alright that’s enough background let’s use this knowledge to make some fake meat the important part to remember is that the goal is to set the reaction up in such a way that when heated the components make something that tricks your brain into thinking it’s meat so we

Just need to supply the correct starting ingredients think of cooking like blurring the image the tongue is seeing then raising the saturation the starting details get lost but there is an expected outcome if we just put the right colors in the right spots after the blur effect you end up with

Something close enough to fool your brain and since most biological matter contains the same stuff it doesn’t take much to tip the flavor towards meat here’s the recipe that I found worked from the patent and beside it my own recipe that I developed after a bunch of testing they’re similar but there are

Some important differences all we need to do is mix the ingredients by blending them together and the reaction will just happen automatically when we add it either to hot water or when we cook with it right off the bat you can see that we’re dealing with salty sweet and

Building a base of umami though I find this to be way too salty so I reduced it a key detail is that it’s important to use glucose also known as dextrose for the sugar here and not ordinary table sugar it’s not only contributing to the flavor but it’s actually at the core of

The reaction that generates the meat flavors so it’s important not to substitute then we have our texture and protein base in the form of defatted soy protein and some normal wheat flour we also have a source of fat and though the patent calls for vegetable oil in

Testing I found that flax oil gives the best flavor as its composition is the closest I could find to animal fat the last three ingredients are the core of the meat flavor but you probably don’t recognize most of them these are arachidonic acid ribonucleotides and cysteine hydrochloride

Starting with arachidonic acid this is a very large lipid molecule that is found in two places meat and brown algae since we’re trying to make meat we’re going to use the brown algae in this case kombu a species of kelp you can buy at most Asian grocery stores that comes as big

Dry leaves just blend it into a powder and add it to the mixture I found three grams is sufficient for the batch size we’re making next we have ribonucleotides this just means shredded RNA turns out one of the other chemicals besides MSG that gives Umami and savory notes is good old-fashioned shredded

Life Essence but trying to Google RNA juice won’t turn up anything useful what you want is disodium indocinate and disodium guanolate when I was looking for a source for this I found this sauce it’s made of hydrolyzed wheat amongst other things but it’s chock full of ribonucleotides and a little bonus MSG

Though you could probably also get away with a small amount of Vegemite for the same effect either way two milliliters is sufficient provide the ribonucleotides we need for the chicken flavor the last ingredient is actually the star of the whole show and that’s cysteine it’s one of the few

Sulfur-containing amino acids and when mixed with glucose and proteins and then heated will react to form a huge variety of foreign theols and other sulfur-containing chemicals however after trawling around some other patents I found that other sulfur-containing amino acids not only can also make meat flavors but by combining a few of them

You get much more complex meat flavors the way I figured this out was the way we figure out most things in science enough trial and error to give me soup based nightmares so while you’re encouraged to experiment on your own I’ll save you a lot of time and just

Give you the summary of what I found one gram of cysteine as a baseline is the most chickony in terms of single amino acids but going too high on the level and it starts tasting more like vegetables than chicken mixing one to one taurine and thiamine which is also

Known as Vitamin B1 gives a great beefy flavor but the best chicken flavor I found by far was a one to one to eight mix of cysteine taurine and methionine methionine gives so much richness and depth to the mixture but it just isn’t chickeny enough on its own to do chicken

You must have some amount of cysteine the last add-ons before we get to the taste test aren’t mentioned in the patent but I found helped a lot from my own experimentation the first is about 5 grams of nutritional yeast and the second was powdered dried mushrooms also

Chicken is a very delicate flavor and so you have to be super precise about all the ingredients whereas for beef you basically just crank up the amount of mushroom kombu and switch to taurine and thiamine and then throw in a bunch of brown flavors things like soy sauce Browning miso and balsamic vinegar

Playing with different combinations and the levels of the different ingredients will get you sort of whatever meat flavor you want in theory but that’s the science now let’s see how it works in practice so you’re not just taking my word for it here’s how I set up a

Double-blind trial I made these coasters that either say fake or real on the bottom then I prepared five identical looking batches of soup two of these are homemade fakes and the other three are different brands of commercially available chicken stock in this case boxed concentrated and hyper-concentrated paste these were all

Used as instructed so if they said to add a certain amount of water to the concentrate that was how much I used I made a master batch of spices and put the exact same amount into five jars of soup then heated them all in the microwave for exactly three minutes then

They all were allowed to sit for 10 minutes to develop the flavor before adding Browning to balance the color so they all look the same and finally they were all adjusted with salt to be as close to the same saltiness as I could get it and all of the non-fakes were

Given a quarter teaspoon of MSG so that the fakes don’t have an unfair advantage to really sell the illusion and force the participants to only be able to go by taste and smell each of the soups was filtered into their respective glasses and I cooked noodles and some mixed

Veggies on the side which could be added to each glass so that both I can’t cheat or accidentally give away the secret after the glasses were placed in front of the participants I would turn my back and they were instructed to mix up the glasses as long as they kept them on

Their proper coaster we could find out at the end which were real and which were fake without either of us knowing during the test now you know the plan so let’s get testing all right so the way that this works is you have five soups

In front of you and you aren’t going to know how many of them are real and how many of them are synthetic they’re all chicken flavored there will be at least one fake and at least one reel so the first thing I want you to do you have a

Palette cleanser of some nice a fresh baguette and you’ve got a nice spoon so all you have to do is first thing taste all of them and then order them based on which one you think tastes the best hmm okay I already think this one will be that’s delicious it’s a chicken

They’re all gonna taste like chicken aren’t they hmm do you use some dill yeah I’m tempted to treat this like wine I feel like that I’m like just honestly like to a certain extent just basting it on saltiness hmm can’t tell that much difference between these two so I’m gonna set it

This way it’s very watery that’s the real broth that’s gonna be a very good they’re all good I don’t know it’s pretty tough I mean right now it’s just by taste you’re not really looking for the fake you’re just looking for which one oh like oh okay yeah I mean I

Kind of did that anyway these ones I don’t like as much okay I don’t know which one I like less that’s probably kind of accurate I’ll do a quick test and see watch right they’re all fake all right so you’re happy with that order yay so that’s your that’s your preference so my

My okay but nope it’s this okay I should say I believe that these are fake okay and that these are real and I put the fake ones in the order that I like them in and the real ones in the order that I like them okay now the really hard bit

Which ones are fake which ones are real if you think one is uh fake just push it forward a little bit fake is the one that you made yes fake fake is does not contain any actual chicken I think these two at a minimum are fake okay so you think those two are

Fake but these taste like they have chicken in them to me okay these taste so delicious but I can’t actually discern chicken flavor from them yeah that’s the final decision yeah okay okay we’ll start with the one that you like the most and let’s see what that one was

Again I don’t you don’t know what to see I honestly don’t know what it is okay so just live so just flip the coaster and show it to the well I mean have a look hey hot damn oh no hey fake hey oh my God and then show them to the camera [Laughter]

All right so here just keep it flipped over just so that’s one fake so so far that’s that’s the the fake has been rated the best and you didn’t catch it fake fake two opposite of what I’m thinking okay hey you got a real one okay nice let’s see how you did great

Hey nice pretty good let’s see how we did look real oh interesting real huh fake and real very interesting okay you got a real one nice all right that’s the one I like the least out of the real one oh oh no if these are real I’m gonna

Really tell me what brands they are and I’ll never buy them no wait I’m gonna okay all right that’s right now like split the last one all told I’d call this a huge success and if you give this a try be sure to let us know what you thought in the

Comments down below since most of the ingredients can only be purchased in larger quantities for actually really small amounts of money by the time you have everything to give this a go you basically have enough to make a literal swimming pool of soup before I wrap up

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Making awesome videos like this one and if you enjoyed these more food-centric projects check out our second Channel The Taste Emporium but that’s where I’ll leave it for now thanks as always to the amazing patrons channel members and supporters on Kofi who help make these videos possible your support is so

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