Welcome to How To Cook That: A Quest to Replicate the Secret Coke Recipe

I'm Ann Reardon and this week, we're embarking on an exciting adventure - trying to replicate the secret recipe for Coca-Cola. Yes, you read that right! The iconic beverage's formula is known only to two people on Earth, and they're not allowed to fly at the same time in case the plane crashes. While we can't guarantee that our attempts will be successful, I'm thrilled to share my approach with you.

Instead of relying on old recipes from someone's journal or Coke's official claims that they're not authentic, I've decided to take a completely different approach. I'll make a variety of ingredients and fresh extracts, and then experiment with different combinations to see if we can come up with something that tastes like Coca-Cola. So, let's get started!

First, I need some basic ingredients. Here's my plain water, which is essential for our project. Next, I've made a sugar syrup by heating equal parts of sugar and water until the sugar dissolves. This will be one component of our Coke recipe. I've also created a light caramel by heating sugar, water, and glucose syrup in a pan until it reaches the hard crack point. Then, I added more water to create a smooth syrup. For the third component, I left the mixture on the heat for a bit longer, allowing it to turn darker and develop a deeper flavor. To enhance this color, I also added a pinch of citric acid, which is one of the main additives in Coca-Cola.

Now, let's talk about the spices that give Coke its unique flavor. I've got vanilla, cinnamon, and nutmeg - all from different leaves. I want to explore if these flavors can be combined with natural extracts to recreate the iconic taste. Interestingly, some online sources claim that Coca-Cola still contains coca leaf, which is used to make cocaine. However, due to regulations, it's not available in Australia or the US. Instead, I'll use cola nuts for caffeine, as that's where the flavor comes from.

For the next part of our experiment, I need some fresh fruit extracts. To create these, I've taken different citrus fruits and grated their rinds. The goal is to extract the natural flavors from these rinds without using any artificial additives. By heating the grinded rind with juice, we can infuse the liquid with the desired flavor. After boiling and straining, I'm left with a few different extracts - each one unique and promising.

Now, it's time to combine our ingredients. I've gathered various recipes online that seem plausible, but I want to add my own twist. By mixing these fresh fruit extracts with spices and other components, we can create something that might taste like Coca-Cola. To begin, I'm going to take a sniff of each extract to see if they evoke any familiar flavors.

Hmm, the plain water still tastes like... well, plain water! It's essential to note that not all ingredients in Coca-Cola are natural or unique to its recipe. Theories and recipes abound online, but recreating the exact formula is no easy feat. As I continue experimenting with different combinations, I'll be searching for that elusive Coke taste.

As we embark on this culinary journey, keep in mind that our attempts might not lead to a perfect replica of Coca-Cola. However, by exploring various ingredients and techniques, we can learn more about the art of flavor creation and maybe even discover some new favorites along the way.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enWelcome to How To Cook That I'm Ann Reardon and this week we are trying to replicate the recipe  for Coke 🥤 That's right the secret recipe that apparently only two people on Earth know  and they're not allowed to fly on a plane at the same time in case the plane crashes! That recipe,  we're going to try and figure out. Now I've seen lots of old recipes that are apparently  from someone's journal and then Coke says they're not and who knows if they are or they aren't but  inevitably people who get all those ingredients and make them put it all together and then say  it doesn't taste of Coke. So I thought i'd take a completely different approach and what I've done  is I've made a whole heap of different ingredients and different fresh extracts so that then we can  put those together and experiment and see if we can come up with something that tastes like Coke.  So i'm going to have a go I'm going to get James to have a go and Dave to have a go and see who  can get the closest to what Coke tastes like and then we'll give you those recipes. So first of all  what are all these extracts? Well this is plain water because we need some water this  one here is sugar syrup to make that we've got equal parts of sugar and water just heat it up  until the sugar's dissolved let it cool put it in the bottle. This one is a light caramel so  to make that I've put the sugar and the water and a little bit of glucose syrup in a pan and heated  it up just until it gets to hard crack point then added back in more water until we got that smooth  syrup. I did the exact same thing with this one except instead of pulling it off the pan when  it was just at crack hard stage I left it there for a bit longer so we've got a deeper caramel  and the same again for this one but this one I left it there long enough to burn  and I also added a little bit of citric acid into it in the process which gave it that really dark  color. The reason I did that even though I think it tastes awful really bad 🥴 is because one of the  main additives in coke is a color 150d which is also a flavor which from what I've read is  made by heating sugar with an acid until it gets that deep color and a slightly burnt sugar aroma,  so who knows that might be our secret to getting the right color and the right flavor ... maybe  not. Over here I've got a mixture based on all different recipes I've seen online for  coke so here i've got some fresh fruit extracts to make those I firstly just took the fruit and  grated that little outside bit of the rind off you don't want the white just the colored bit of the  rind then put that into a pan with some juice and I'll put all these recipe amounts on the website  so if you want to make it you can and then just heated that up until it boiled and then left it  just to sit and let all the flavor from the rind infuse into the liquid. I then just strained that  with the orange i could just use a sieve to strain it with the other two with the lime and the lemon  it tended to go straight through the sieve so I then had to use a cheesecloth to strain those so  that we were left just with a liquid because we don't want chunks in the Coke. Next here  we've got the spices we've got vanilla cinnamon and nutmeg these ones are all from different  leaves I have heard that Coca-Cola still has coca leaf in it which is the leaf that's used to make  cocaine so I can't get coca leaf here in Australia and I believe the us you can't get it either and  the coal a bit was from cola nuts which is where the caffeine comes from. I'm not actually going to  add any caffeine because that's not actually going to affect the flavor I'm just after the flavor and  if you want to add caffeine later you can but back to the coca leaf the coca leaf that they use now  has been decocainized in other words the cocaine component taken out and then apparently they still  use it for the flavor. From what I can find online it doesn't taste of a whole lot someone  said it tastes a bit like green tea so I do have some green tea that I have stewed up here which  doesn't look green of course but then I also got a couple of other leaves just to see if a different  leaf fresh leaf flavor would be better, so this is fresh bay leaves that have then been boiled up  pureed and strained and this is fresh kefir lime leaves as well so given all of these I'm going to  see if we can mix it together and make anything that tastes something like Coke ... here we go 😀I think I'm gonna start by just smelling each of them...It still just tastes like water...So are all these in Coke? Not necessarily, so there's various  theories and recipes people have come up with so flavor ... oh that's tricky ... so as long  as it's from a natural source it can just say \"flavor\". So but see the sugar is interesting  because that would just be on the label of sugar but you can have all different flavors  of your sugar depending what you do with it. Oh wow! So it can change the flavor have fun.More ... more!It's alive 👨🏼‍🔬oh yuck!It's not quite Coke yet! While Dave tries to figure out that recipe  I'd like to say a big thank you to today's sponsor Word Farm Adventure. It's an ios and Android game  and it's got two parts to it ... the first part let me show you here is a word game where you  have the letters down the bottom and you have to make them into words and fit them into the puzzle  at the top so it's a bit like unscrambling all the letters. I really enjoy word games so  I really like this part and once you complete a puzzle so you've got all of the words done,  then you get golden shovels and coins and you can use those in the other part of the game.  So in the other part of the game you get to fix and decorate different areas. I'm up to the  farmhouse area and if I scroll across you can see that some of the rooms are done but others of them  obviously still need a lot of work. So if we click on the list down in the bottom corner it  tells you what needs doing next and then you can choose from the options it gives you what  style you want to decorate your farmhouse in so that it looks how you want it to be.  Jedd really enjoys playing this game too which is great, I like it when they enjoy games that seem  a little bit more educational than some of them are. You can get Word Farm Adventure on ios and  Android and I'll put a link below to where you can download it for free and start enjoying it today.She did say I could add anything I wanted so ... 😏So my final recipe had a mixture of the dark caramel syrup, the  light caramel syrup and a fair amount of just the regular sugar syrup in order to get it as sweet.  In one of mine i put in a bit of cinnamon but that didn't work at all um I had a bit of bay  leaf a tiny bit of orange, some green tea but i'm not sure if the green tea even made a difference.  I think the biggest difference between my first and second one was using the tartaric acid  instead of the citric acid. I found the citric acid just made it taste too lemony like it was  a lemonade or a Fanta or something. So the mix that I finished on has water obviously,  tartaric acid I felt that citric acid was the wrong flavor, two tiny drops of salt in it lots  of the burnt caramel which tastes horrible on its own but once you add more sugar kind of gives that  Coke flavor. Some of the light caramel so this one some of the sugar syrup obviously we needed  more sugar in there a little bit of bay leaf that was just the perfect flavor the fresh bay  leaf I really liked that a little bit of the green tea and then I felt like it was missing  something like it had this slight floral note that i was familiar with from honey but i didn't want  the honey flavor so I went out in the garden and got just five heads of lavender put it in some  boiling water and got this lovely purple little lavender liquid and I added a few drops of that  in there as well and i think that's as close as I'm gonna get. I'm not convinced that the acid  is 100 right because they don't use tartaric acid I did order some of the acid that they use but it  just hasn't arrived and being in lockdown i can't get to any shops that sell that sort of thing so  this is as close as I can get i reckon it's pretty good. Cheers 🥂Tastes like Coke ... tastes like Coke. Yeah I think we're all in agreement that's a real Coke,  okay number two ... I am thinking this must have a heap of burnt caramel in it  to get it to be this color but let's see. Oh such a fragrance  🇫🇷Tastes like Coke ... it tastes like green tea and cinnamon. Wow, was that yours? It might have been.  How did you get the color so dark? It's a secret.It's pretty good. That tastes pretty close let  me taste it yeah I'm gonna need to taste the original again. That's pretty good.It's a bit less sweet than Coke I think Coke's a bit sweeter but the flavor's not bad.You're right it is a little bit more acidic but it's definitely  cola I guess. Yeah i feel like I'm tasting lemon but I reckon that's the color 🍋Which one tastes more like coke the clear one. This one's awesome 😉 This  one is winning so far okay next ... that one tastes more caramel than coke.Hard to tell. How can I have cheated and mine still tastes worse than the other  two. How did you cheat? N'yeah ... What did you do? Nothing 😏  How did you cheat? I don't know, black food coloring. Black boot polish! So you're saying  you cheated and ours tastes more like Coke than yours does. Yes! Dave is not a flavor developer.  This one I don't know it's definitely got too much of caramel, like you can taste the caramel  in it. You can bit too much of a caramel note to it. That could be mine I did put a lot of  the caramel one in. This one's very close except the acidity is just too high but it's actually  it's kind of there. It might just be the different type of acid. It might be that's pretty close I  think this one's the closest. I think so yeah. So number three ... that was James!Uh number two was definitely Dave now tell us what was your secret ingredient?  My secret ingredient Coke was Pepsi. How does it taste green tea and cinnamon? Well I put those  in as well ... green tea, cinnamon and Pepsi syrup. Oh my goodness thank you so much to all  my patrons for your support. Make sure you let the algorithm know if you liked this video by  liking commenting sharing and subscribing make it a great week and we'll see you on Friday byeYour's is horrible.It is!\n"