If that is the case, then the best advice is to stay away from cheap, mass-produced items that do not use real vanilla extract - most products that somehow still manage to impart that oh-so-lovely vanilla scent to their products without the genuine article do so with the aid of castoreum. Safe or not, the thought of consuming beaver secretions might turn your stomach.

At the time, fresh food and baking ingredients were hard to come by. If you find this ingredient slightly off-putting and want to avoid it, you may have more trouble doing that than you think, as castoreum is often listed simply as вЂњnatural flavoring.вЂќ According to the Food and Drug Administration, castoreum is a generally recognized as safe - which means it is considered safe by experts and thus is exempt from more stringent tolerance requirements. It was a pure vanilla extract, which we used to call essence, in a small glass bottle. It seems totally bizarre that something used to denote territory by one mammal should be used by another mammal as a flavoring for food, but the reality is that castoreum (once processed) actually has a very pleasant smell. Castor sacs are a type of scent gland located between the pelvis and base of the tail, and the castoreum that the glands produce is used by beavers to mark their territory. The ingredient is called castoreum and comes from the castor sacs of beavers. Pure vanilla extract is generally clear, colorless, odorless, and tasteless. Pure vanilla extract is available in liquid form or as a solid block. Take note that besides pure vanilla extracts, some vanilla flavoring is actually engineered fungi or bacteria in laboratories to imitate the flavor of a real plant-extracted vanilla. It is extracted from the seeds of Vanilla Planifolia, a tropical plant native to Mexico and Central America. Natural vanilla flavoring mostly comes from plants such as vanilla orchids then once this plant is pollinated, it will produce its fruits called vanilla beans. If you are partial to a scoop of vanilla, raspberry, or strawberry ice cream every now and then (or more regularly than that) you may be in for a bit of a surprise: A key ingredient in many vanilla-flavored products - from ice cream to baked goods, pudding, and candy - actually comes from beavers. Pure vanilla extract is a flavoring agent used in baking and other culinary applications. Does Vanilla Flavoring Come from Beaver Anal Secretions Alarmist warnings about beaver-derived castoreum are overblown: its use is now exceedingly rare, and the typical consumer is unlikely to.

Where does vanilla flavoring come from