Herbs and Spices are indeed strange beasts. For example, when I was seeking out oil analysis results for Mexican Oregano I found Thymol results ranging from about 4% to about 31% of the analyzed oil, and Carvacrol (the ingredient that makes it taste like Oregano) results ranging from about 14.5% to 52%. When Thymol was high, Carvacrol was low, and visa-versa.
Many herbs and spices similarly have flavor/aroma oil analyticals that are scattered all over the board. One never knows what they are getting.
Some unsolicited thoughts:
Another area to consider is that the strongest perceived aromas do not necessarily correspond to peaks on a GCMS graph.
Our receptors seem very very non-linear. CHS advocated for a pinch of nutmeg in gravy to greatly enhance its flavor, and it does.
I’d suggest buying Spice Islands
whole nutmeg and grating it, for best aroma, btw. It is truly amazing. Also excellent on coffee.
As a YouTube video suggested, if you hold your nose and drink blueberry seltzer, it tastes like unflavored seltzer.
So if what many consider taste is mostly smell, and smell isn’t linear, combinatorial, or intuitive, so it becomes quite a tricky problem.
We look at ingredients and think of bulk amounts and associated results, but sometimes a
tiny tiny shift can move an aroma over a detection
threshold and now you can easily smell it. There are some
hops combinations theory links for beer making elsewhere related to this.
For example, I’d suggest if @11serbs has found success with significantly more garlic, never adding significantly more than you currently use might be an error. If it doesn’t work for you, the next stop might not be to reduce it, but perhaps to figure out if there is a combination missing that you aren’t using that modifies it.
Is it being roasted by the Maillard process? As you know garlic tones down once it is cooked. Is it being mellowed by another spice? Some have said that onion modifies the effect of garlic. Or perhaps even start with roasted garlic. Mccormick buys a lot of roasted garlic….
Of course, when you don’t use the same technique (pressure frying etc.) the recipes won’t behave quite the same. It seems important to adequately explore the space, if others have found success, and they seem competent.
Lastly, in my opinion there really isn’t a good reason to make the spices add up to a “compliant” amount like 40 ounces (or especially 26), or
strictly limit yourself to 11. If even one blended spice was used, that adds 4 or 5 herbs spices right there. And both black and white pepper can easily be counted as 1. There was a newspaper article interviewing an original Canadian franchise owner who mentioned he had the handwritten recipe locked up at the bank. When asked, he would not commit to 11 in the article, basically saying, oh, I don’t remember how many it was, it was quite a long list….
The article is still on the web.
If Sanders had used an older tin of Schilling / McCormick
curry powder as one ingredient for example (say 1/4 tsp for 1 cup flour)
it actually has listed for ingredients:
coriander, fenugreek, turmeric, pepper, bay leaves, celery seed, nutmeg, cloves, onion, cayenne, orange peel, gingerAnd probably would not taste like what we first think of as “curry” powder today.
Stange in Chicago (the extract people who have been make the technical part of the seasoning since the 1960’s, and possibly earlier) themselves say in a 1976 newspaper interview with William Gruber that they had a relationship with Kentucky Fried Chicken going back to
1962, and since that’s the incorporation date of Colonel’s Foods, the predecessor of K.F.C. that’s pretty much the beginning. A recipe not incorporating extracts might have been 40oz (or maybe even 62.5 ounces), but also could have originally been for more like 10 pounds of flour, not 25. It is quite possible Stange supplied their trademarked
Pepperall or Peppercream products to Sanders and Harmon before that as a single ingredient in the early 1950’s for them to mix themselves. Stange also had facilities in California and Canada.
