bubblegum: the flavor of baseball
big league chew, bazooka or juicy fruit: what the hell is “bubblegum” flavor?
We’re a month into baseball season (Go Tigers) and kiddos are out on their little league fields. For some reason, I started to reminisce on my (underwhelming and practically nonexistent) days on the diamond and how much I loved Big League Chew. I distinctly remember playing in the summer and grabbing whatever sunflower seeds or gum my teammate was able to convince their Dad at the gas station to buy on the way to the game. Normally it was grape or watermelon, but whenever they could snag a pouch of that shedded pink (definitely not marketing chewing tobacco to the young and impressionable) shreds of that delicious bubble gum and the game just went better.
I also thought about the moments where I was able to convince my mom to buy Juicy Fruit at the counter because I finally didn’t have to chew Double Mint. There was something magical about the bright pink hue and unrecognizable flavor of it. I would just be cheering on the inside about how happy I was about such a gratifying experience. Chewing on that for hours and wondering when I could get another some other day of the week, when my Mom would drop us to piano or pick us up from practice.
But what the hell is bubblegum flavor, for real?
I want to dive in a bit on what the hell bubblegum flavor is and maybe even how to make a cool, bespoke version of your own. I’m not saying it’s going to be a one-for-one experience, but I think it’s fun to try to make the inspiration of flavors and I think that makes for a fun cocktail 🤷🏻♂️
what is the flavor of bubble gum?
Well, even the flavor of bubble gum is a mystery to large gum manufacturers. Many employ flavor houses to artificially or naturally derived scents to combine in such a way that is contractually unique and, so, brand-specific. Your bubblegum flavor from Bazookas and to your Dubble Bubbles are similar, but you know what you’re getting when you unwrap it. Many of the flavor houses speak to it having four main components: sweet, fruity, spiced and citrus. We all know sweet after talking about it a few months back, but I think the other components deserve some inspection.
First – why are fruity and citrus different components? Many fruits have an overlap in the scents they produce. This obviously doesn’t mean that all fruits are the same, but they do have a scent pattern that to humans smells like “generic fruit”. This is like our language’s ability to distinguish the 10,000 scents we can smell. When we get into specific fruits, we start to be able to downselect them as a specific fruit family. Limonene is unusually high in citrus fruits and more use of this can start to push this “generic fruit” scent to “citrus fruit.” Is it a lime? Is it a yuzu? Who cares? We see it as citrus. Now turning up the dials on limonene, and also slightly turning up linalool, ethyl butyrate and more, we get this sultry mix of citrus and fruity.
What about “spiced”? We get some minty, herbaceous stuff going on (which I guess makes it an herb) that combines with flavors of cinnamon, clove and vanilla. All of your favorite baking spices (besides cardamom 😭) are there! This gives some more grounding to the citrusy, fruity sweetness we’ve found ourselves in and rounds it out.
We can see now how a holy quadfecta could make this flavor complex, irresistible, uncopyable and pined for by an elementary school boy who conned a parent at Target checkout (me). By mastering the track of these four components (which are many more compounds than I could list), different brands can create their own dance party in your mouth.
bubble gum vs. tutti frutti
Did you know that anyone outside of the US likely associates these different flavor combos as “tutti frutti”? It all began with Adam’s Chewing Gum, which debuted in 1888 to compete with Black Jack, a licorice-flavored gum. Thomas Adams was actually encouraged by Santa Anna (yeah, that one) to make a rubber alternative from chicle. He failed at making tires, but killed it in the gum game. But what was one to do to make it compete with this hot licorice product on the shelves? How about ALL THE FRUITS??? Or what “tutti frutti” means in Italian. This flavor stuck harder with the growing gum-chewing community in the world and it’s not really going back. Little Richard did his part to enact that change with his sock hop hit of Tutti-Frutti from 1955.
how is bubble gum flavored today?
I started to think more about how you might be able to create this flavor today. Some of my favorite beers are hefeweizen and saisons which both can have a prominent bubblegum presence. Yeast strains are the culprit for how to ferment these common beer grains into something new. One of my favorites is SafAle BE-134 which can enhance these four components of bubblegum to historic levels.
There are also many natural ways we derive many of these components, from (shocker) fruits and spices. We can start things off with an orange, lemon, lime, pineapple, raspberry and blackberry and add our cinnamon sticks, cloves, and vanilla bean to the mix. Just like the flavor houses, the type of fruit and their quantities to make all types of bubblegum variants. Let’s dig into what’s in mine though:
natural bubble gum flavor
250g fresh pineapple
100g fresh honey mango
75g strawberry
75g raspberry
75g blueberry
40g Montmorency cherry
3g cinnamon
1.5g clove
3g vanilla
Blend that all up and strain out the seeds and pulp. I love to then add 3% salt w/w and maybe something spicy to let ferment and spread on bread with olive oil and salt. I want to sterilize it one day and add a saison yeast and let those high notes hit, but time will tell.