welcome friends today in the kitchen we're gonna do something a little bit
special we're going to do the 1880s Pemberton coca-cola formula and so
Pemberton is the guy who invented coca-cola recipe
he invented coca-cola in the hopes that he could wean himself off of morphine
with cocaine in the end it didn't work for him. so so he came up with this
formula and this is out of one of his notebooks and it is by no means the
recipe or formula the coca-cola uses today and they're very adamant about
that but by making this it should give us a little bit of insight into where
this product started and what it tasted like at the beginning and often what
things taste like way back then is nothing like they do today so I started
out with some high proof alcohol you want to get the highest proof that you
possibly can and so what I've got is 76% 152 proof grain alcohol that's the
highest that I can get where I live if you can get higher make sure it's food
grade make sure that you can drink it because you can get yourself into very
solid trouble if you don't make sure it's food grade which brings us to the
next thing which are these essential oils now I first wanted to do this back
in 2011 what eight nine years ago I heard a broadcast This American Life on
NPR and it was all about this formula and it really intrigued me and I wanted
to do it and at that time everyone said to me don't bother you can't get all the
ingredients and they were right I couldn't get all the ingredients and you
know what I still can't get all of the ingredients so these are food grade oils
that you need to get there in this form pretty toxic you don't want to touch
them you don't want to get them on you and there was one in particular that I
couldn't get and that is neroli oil and tiny
a little bottle of neroli oil like this this is five mils of neroli oil was four
hundred and eighty dollars us to get this little bottle and the company said
to me oh we can get it for you at a cheaper break if you buy four hundred
pounds it's 1.2 million like I don't think I need 400 pounds of neroli oil so
the first thing we need to do is measure tiny little amounts of these essential
oils and mix them into this alcohol and so I've got these tiny little syringes
they're one milliliter each and we'll measure these out being very careful not
to cross staminate not to get it on your hands and to get the right amounts so
the oils we're working with our orange lemon nutmeg coriander neroli and
cinnamon oil so the first substitution is bitter orange oil instead of Naru Li
or neroli everyone seems to say that's going to be fine
so this is our 7x formula this is the 7x flavoring and we're only going to use a
tiny little bit of this for a couple gallons of coca-cola very tiny little
bit the next substitution that you have to make is is the coca part it is
illegal to have coca leaves in North America and you need coca leaf extract
there's no cocaine in coca-cola anymore they they pull that out in a factory
apparently in New Jersey and then only put in the bittering compounds from the
coca leaf but since we can't have coca leaves I'm worked around a little bit
and I found another extract that has sort of the same flavonoid bittering
compounds and I'm gonna give that a try I think you should probably just leave
it out though I'm a little worried obviously that wasn't a real coca leaf
I'm a little worried that I'm not going to get it quite right
so now we move on to the sugar syrup component so we're gonna start it with
some water in a big pot
and the next thing is to weigh out the sugar so I know that everyone has been
freaked out for years that you know perhaps way back there was cocaine and
coca-cola I would posit that the real killer in this soft drink is the sugar
like that's a lot of sugar so and it goes into the water and we want to just
we just want to dissolve that we're making a simple syrup
it's we'll just gently heat this and stir it until the sugar has dissolved
while the sugar is dissolving I am going to juice some limes so the sugar is
pretty much dissolved and now we just add in caramel
okay the sugar syrup is dissolved we didn't bring it up to a boil we didn't
really get it hot just warm enough that the sugar crystals disappear into the
water next in is vanilla I've got my notes open because I just want to make
sure I get this right so in goes the vanilla and I normally don't measure
vanilla I free pour but somehow this time I think it's important to to
measure this is off to the point where if you were using extract of coca you
would put it in we're not putting anything in and I decided not to put
anything in in its place so next in is the caffeine extract now I
know it's called coca after the coca leaf and cola after the Kola nut but by
1880 1885 Pemberton already wasn't using Kola nut he was only using citrate of
caffeine so directly he had decided that it wasn't the flavor that he was after
it was the caffeine that he was after so he stopped using Kola nut at that point
and there's no reason to believe that Coca Cola is using Kola nut anymore so
it's just straight caffeine mixture 3.75 mils and apparently this is
about five times the amount of caffeine that is in Cola beverages today at the
store or any beverage today at the store are really high caffeine
what's that goes in the lime juice so freshly squozen lime juice and citric
acid citric acid is something that is not used in today's coke you can tell
that because they use phosphoric acid I think it is on the label they do list
the acid that they use and that's it for the sugar syrup okay so we've got our 7x
flavor mixture and our sugar water caramel mixture and there's a bit of
math involved because you only use a very little bit like 1.5 milliliters per
liter of sugar syrup so I need to measure how much sugar syrup we have and
then determine how much 7x to mix into it so it looks like two point two five
liters so we need three milliliters of 7x
let's see living dangerously there we go
mix that in let's just give that a straight-up taste so this is this is
really concentrated let's just see if it's even edible huh I can see where
that's going let's see what Julie thinks a little
enthusiastic poor little yes on the first pour well I mean I want to make
sure that the I know that the carbonation mixed with the syrup and
also I've over carbonated that keg of water that's you got a kind of a
brownish brown tone it smells very there's no interesting there's it over
Smith yeah like there's a smell to it yeah there I get a lime I do get a lime
flavor overwhelming lime flavor okay that's the it's sweet it is sweet it's
very sweet but don't you sweet for me it's a refreshing beverage I like it
it's not coke I think it's too sweet oh oh no no no no but you can it would be
considered a : it's a brown beverage yeah it would go well with people who
like rum and coke it would do just fine Pepsi do you think it's like Pepsi I I
don't think I've ever had a Pepsi I don't think I've ever had a Pepsi yeah
you probably have anyway it doesn't matter um no no but it's I can see how
this evolved into coke this doesn't have the bite that Coke has there's a bitter
that sort of yeah yeah what I don't know that's a lovely beverage so I would just
might we make it less sweet yeah I would I would chop it some of the sugar
I've definitely chopped it some of the sugar and maybe up the amount of
7x so an interesting experiment I think it's a worthwhile beverage yeah there's
the funny fun right yeah I mean as much as we look very you know it is longer
it's like we were we're not yeah it is a worthwhile beverage it's I
would definitely drink it I don't know that it's would stand up against beside
a coke but in order to actually test this we are going to do the ultimate
Pepsi challenge we're going to test this against you stated yourself I know again
well I am part of the Pepsi generation I'm gonna we're gonna do this Coke and
Pepsi Canadian Coke and Pepsi okay Mexican Coke and Pepsi okay Jessica just
came true yeah oh okay the actual Mexican Coke versus Mexican colas yes
like the would probably find a hurry dose see if we can find the hurry toes
Mexican Cola Inca Cola Inca Cola and wild card thumbs up thumbs up yeah yeah
another colas type in the world and so we'll do a blind tasting of all of them
the reality is all of the large manufacturers of beverages have multiple
versions of their beverages that they serve sell it in multiple nations
because everybody has a slightly different palate depending upon what the
reading and what they're matching it with right so there's so many versions
so if you want to try the 1886 Pemberton Coca Cola recipe give it a shot I mean
there's a couple there's no cocaine that's know so that might change the
fact it's not good as exciting might have been long ago with that shot of
cocaine I think that's pretty good I think that's pretty good and the fact
that we now have two and a half liters of syrup I feel like we're gonna have to
host a children's party between all the other beverages we've made recently yeah
pop and chips for everybody two and a half liters yeah we're gonna we've got a
lot of this to go through it next we're stopping by
see you consume