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

Late on the night time of October 28, 2005, and early into the following 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 individuals? A sneak-attack by sentient maple timber?

NYPD, NYFD, and NYC’s emergency administration and environmental safety businesses launched an investigation that decided the scent was innocent, nevertheless it didn’t determine a supply. The odor disappeared, and life went on. Till it popped up once more someday in March 2006. And once more that November. And once more a yr after that. Then-hit TV present 30 Rock even made a joke concerning the mysterious scent.

It took nearly 4 years of sporadic fragrant occasions to lastly clear up the thriller: The maple syrup scent got here from a manufacturing facility in New Jersey processing fenugreek. Usually known as by its Hindi title, methi, fenugreek’s seeds and leaves may be present in stews and spice mixes all through a lot of the diversified 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 typically go into pickles. “My grandmother would do lots of pickling, and we’d at all times play with the methi seeds. One time she mentioned, ‘chunk this.’ I chewed on some and so they had been so bitter I by no means wished 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 adjusted his thoughts about methi. At one Toronto restaurant, he was accountable for making house-cured salmon for brunch and experimented with numerous completely different components. One mixture of lemon, dill, and methi was particularly common. “It turned out to be very flavorful,” he remembers. “Individuals began asking, ‘What’s completely different about this?’ However no person might select why.”

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

The molecule answerable 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 types of different sudden 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 manner up by the ranks of the corporate and coaching in tasting and chemistry, she’s now accountable for formulating savory, candy, and beverage flavors for manufacturers you’ve undoubtedly heard of, however which she’s not allowed to call. (In case you see “pure flavors” or “synthetic flavors” on an components checklist, there’s likelihood Givaudan made them.)

Juelg describes sotolon as a “candy, brown” molecule that you just’d seemingly 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 usually used along side different, extra inexpensive chemical substances. Your pumpkin spice drinks, and granola bars, and candies, and candles, are made with a mixture of molecules which will embrace sotolon, too.

Sotolon is a lactone, which has a really particular definition associated to molecular construction that’s manner too difficult to speak about right here. However for taste functions, lactones are typically oily, and don’t dissolve nicely 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 manner dwelling, and whereas in line have heard individuals say, ‘Do you scent pancakes?’” she remembers. “Even after showering, you’re gonna scent it for a couple of days.”

Sotolon’s texture additionally makes it helpful for the elusive part of taste known as mouthfeel. It “tastes” type of thick, if that makes any sense. “The oiliness of lactones simply lays there and sticks in your tongue,” Juelg says. “We use them so much for ‘fleshiness’ in strawberry or espresso. Stuff you’re attempting to provide 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 in a position to blow throughout the Hudson, however the motive so many individuals observed the maple scent is that it’s particularly potent. Individuals can style it at concentrations of .02 components per million, which is 2000 occasions as potent as vanillin (because the title suggests, a serious part of vanilla taste), one other “candy, brown” molecule Juelg works with incessantly.

With an vital position in each curries and pretend caramels and syrups, sotolon atomically bridges the divide between candy and savory. And a few of the different pure sources of the chemical do the identical. You’ll find numerous sotolon in sweet cap mushrooms, which cooks typically 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 provide a refined maple taste with out including sugar. And there’s even a connection to funny-smelling pee: Victims of a uncommon genetic dysfunction known 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 dad and mom scent, nicely, maple syrup urine, and it may be deadly nevertheless it’s pretty simply handled by regulating amino acids within the food regimen.)

So the following 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 facility or an Indian restaurant—no have to name the police.

October 2020