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It is vanilla (almost certainly artificial), sugar, and gelatin. You can make marshmallows at home.
There is a marshmallow plant, the roots used to be used to make a whipped candy (that's where the name comes from) but now they are literally just air and sugar, gelatin and vanilla, maybe a little cream of tartar.
They're pretty much just processed sugar with some vanilla extract. I've been curious to know if marshmallows made from the marshmallow plant taste different ever since learning that what we tend to have available in a store is far from an actual marshmallow.
It's sugar.
And yes, it might be vanilla. Tons of things have vanilla in them that aren't "vanilla." Like chocolate chip cookies. Like frosting. It's not enough to give it a "vanilla" flavour, just enough to give it something. That's why vanilla is considered boring/default, because in baking, it is.
Now if you're talking roasted marshmallows, you're applying heat to sugar — you're caramelising it. Before you say "I know what fucking caramel tastes like," I'm just describing the process for what is happening to the sugar, and yes, that is actually how caramel is made. It's also how a lot of hard candy is made, too, like those little white and red peppermint discs. Those just use mint extract rather than vanilla. Same concept. Heated more (hard ball stage rather than soft ball).
Look at the ingredients though. If vanilla is listed, it's vanilla. If it's not, you're just tasting sugar. If you're roasting them, you're tasting caramlised sugar (possibly with some vanilla).
It's not a secret ingredient. They have to disclose all ingredients. There are no true mystery flavours out there. White/clear Lifesavers? Those are pineapple. Same with white jellybeans. It's only a mystery to kids, and to those who don't research.
OK, I'll look at the ingredients.
CORN SYRUP, SUGAR, DEXTROSE, MODIFIED CORNSTARCH, WATER, CONTAINS LESS THAN 2% OF GELATIN, TETRASODIUM PYROPHOSPHATE (WHIPPING AID), NATURAL AND ARTIFICIAL FLAVOR, BLUE 1.
https://www.kraftheinz.com/jetpuffed/products/00600699003285-marshmallows
Looks like there is some kind of "natural and artificial flavor" besides sugar and corn syrup. Wat are those? Dunno. Apparently it's legal to have secret ingredients that are not disclosed unless a Non-Disclosure Agreement is signed.
That natural flavor? Vanilla.
Possibly. But there are several different types of vanilla. Also:
An estimated 95% of "vanilla" products are artificially flavored with vanillin derived from lignin instead of vanilla fruits.
and
However, vanillin is only one of 171 identified aromatic components of real vanilla fruits.
Also you may be amused to know:
In the United States, castoreum, the exudate from the castor sacs of mature beavers, has been approved by the Food and Drug Administration as a food additive,[54] often referenced simply as a "natural flavoring" in the product's list of ingredients. It is used in both food and beverages,[55] especially as vanilla and raspberry flavoring, with a total annual U.S. production of less than 300 pounds.[55][56] It is also used to flavor some cigarettes and in perfume-making, and is used by fur trappers as a scent lure.
Huh! Apparently the main places you can taste castoreum nowadays (should you want to) are niche foods like Swedish liqueur. Otherwise it’s (understandably) quite expensive.
I was curious and found this article amusing as well:
I'm glad to hear that. Otherwise we'd be confronted with the possibility of vast factory farms of mature beavers having their "castor sacs" milked daily.
They're supposed to disclose all the ingredients, the contents of my Olive Oil and Peanut Butter would argue they very much do NOT.
Marshmallows are flavored by the marshmallow plant. Its root has a sweet taste and gooy texture. Pretty much all marshmallows now don't contain marshmallow root anymore.
It's Marsh Mallow flavored, though probably artificially:
Just talking about how marshmallows were orginally flavored with Marsh Mallow. Marshmallows are marshmallow flavored.
It's not what you want to hear, but I am pretty sure that as far as added flavorings go, for your bog-standard marshmallow, you're pretty much just looking at vanilla.
Not that it's the only thing you're tasting, there's sugar of course, and that's sugar has been cooked to a certain temperature which changes some of its properties, there's gelatine which has a bit of flavor on its own, there's air mixed into it which affects the both feel which can change how you perceived the flavor, etc. so they're kind of a gestalt flavor experience where the whole thing comes together as more than just the taste of whatever flavor you added to it.
Some people will say that it tastes like marsh mallow (the plant)
Traditionally they would have been made with marshmallow root, almost no one has done it that way in a long time and the marshmallows you're buying at a grocery store almost certainly contain no marshmallow root. I've had some things made with the root, there's not much flavor there, maybe a bit of earthiness, the main point of it was as sort of a thickener, which is the role filled by gelatin in modern marshmallows.
"Bog-standard"... heh.
Dead animals’ skin and bones with some vanilla?
Sugar
idk but I love freeze dried marshmallows and can never find them anywhere.
can't you just throw marshmallows in the freezer and then consume when wanted?
Freeze drying is actually pretty neat
The first step is indeed freezing, basically the same as you would in a regular freezer
But then you take that frozen food, keeping it frozen, and put it in a vacuum chamber.
You might remember from sciences classes in school that different atmospheric temperatures result in water (and other things) freezing or boiling at different temperatures. It's why water boils faster at a higher altitude (and why some packaged foods and recipes have different instructions if you're more than X feet/meters above sea level, the air pressure is lower and so water boils at a lower temperature.
You may also have heard the term sublimation, where a solid turns into a gas without melting into a liquid in-between, like dry ice does, which is solid carbon dioxide, and why it's "dry"
Under a vacuum, ice does the same thing, it turns right into water vapor without melting into water in between.
It actually does this under normal pressure too, but much more slowly. That's actually a lot of what freezer burn is-the water in your food sublimating away into water vapor. And if you've ever left some ice cubes in a freezer for a really long time you might notice they sometimes kind of shrink and get misshapen even though the temperature never got above freezing.
Side note- water actually does kind of a lot of weird stuff when it comes to freezing and melting, in like how given the right conditions, even at normal atmospheric pressure, it can melt or stay liquid well below its freezing temperature, and of course the fact that it expands when frozen.
So the end result is a totally dry, usually pretty shelf-stable product. Because it was frozen, it can retain a lot of it's flavor that might have been cooked off or evaporated with other drying processes.
Some things also take on an interesting texture from the process because all of space in the food that used to be full of water is now full of air. Freeze dried fruits, for example, tend to be really crisp and crumbly sort of like a chip or a cracker, where dehydrated fruit often can be sort of leathery.
And the vacuum process also has effects on some foods besides just drying them out. Skittles, for example, are sort of sealed by their candy shell, so they expand and pop, sort of like popcorn, due to the water inside of them sublimating and expanding until the shell cracks.
If memory serves me, the marshmallows in lucky charms are freeze-dried, which is why their texture is dry and crunchy instead of gooey and fluffy.
oh that's pretty cool, yea I've always just thrown marshmallows in the freezer. Didn't realize there was a difference between them.
That's not what freeze drying is.
interesting. The other person explained what it was, I never knew there was a diff between them. Sounds like its similar just not super tough anymore.
There’s a distinct flavor
Yeah, when I was a kid, there were like 2-3 difference places I could get soft-serve ice cream from, and at one of them the vanilla flavor was marshmallow-like and it was my favorite.
I don't have an answer, tho. For all I know, it was just a distinctive type of vanilla.
Marshmallow and artificial preservatives.
Gelatin