{
    "id": 1070847,
    "title": "How are sweets flavoured?",
    "slug": "how-are-sweets-flavoured",
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    "url": "https://sweeties.net/wiki/how-are-sweets-flavoured/",
    "modified": "2026-09-26T03:52:26+01:00",
    "excerpt": "Sweets get their flavour from flavourings, essential oils such as peppermint, fruity esters and juices, often added after cooking so they do not burn off.",
    "content_text": "Flavour is what makes a sweet taste of pear, mint or strawberry rather than just sugar. Sweet makers draw on four main sources:\nFlavourings, made to taste of a particular fruit or food.Essential oils, such as peppermint oil in mints and aniseed oil in aniseed balls.Fruit esters, strongly fruity compounds such as the ones in pear drops.Fruit juices and extracts, used in some jellies and pastilles. Rowntree's Fruit Pastilles, for example, list concentrated fruit juice among their ingredients.\nWhen the flavour goes in\nFlavours are often added late. In caramel making, vanilla and other flavourings go in only once the cooking is done, because adding them earlier would burn them off at the high temperatures. The machinery maker Loynds describes adding liquid flavours and colours by syringe to the hot boiled sugar on the slab, then folding them in. At Uncle Joe's in Wigan, peppermint oil is sprinkled onto the melted candy and worked in by hand: see how are mint balls made?\nEsters: the pear drop secret\nEsters are compounds that smell strongly of fruit. The pear drop's flavour comes from two of them: isoamyl acetate, which tastes of banana, and ethyl acetate, which tastes of pear. Both are used in many pear and banana flavoured sweets. Bubblegum flavour is also a blend, often including esters: see how are pear drops made? and how is bubblegum made?\nNatural, nature identical and artificial\nFlavourings can be natural, taken from plant or animal sources; nature identical, made to be chemically the same as a natural substance; or artificial, made from chemicals and not found in nature. Because natural extracts can be scarce or expensive, many commercial flavourings are nature identical. Vanilla is a good example: synthetic vanillin is now used more often than natural vanilla extract, and it has been made from clove oil, from wood pulp waste and from petrochemicals.\nWhat natural means on a label\nIn the UK, flavourings are governed by rules that came from the EU Flavouring Regulation of 2008 and became UK law in 2021. A flavouring can be called natural only if it is made only from flavouring preparations and natural flavouring substances. A named natural flavouring, such as natural strawberry flavouring, must come at least 95 per cent from strawberries. If less of it comes from the fruit, but the fruit is still easy to recognise, it can be called natural strawberry flavouring with other natural flavourings. A plain natural flavouring can come from a mix of sources: see how to read a sweet label\nSweet, sour and salty\nUnder the same rules, substances that have only a sweet, sour or salty taste are not counted as flavourings. That is why the acids that make sweets sharp, such as citric and malic acid, appear on labels as ingredients in their own right: see what is citric acid in sweets? and what is malic acid in sweets?",
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