In my previous post on cinnamon, I talked about the chemical coumarin, found in the cassia variant of cinnamon. But all this talk of cinnamon makes me think of... Tonka Beans. Not Tonka Toys, but beans. We rarely hear about tonka beans in Canada (or the US) because it's banned here. But you can get it legally in Europe (esp. France) and some South American countries. 100 years ago, the tonka bean was used in soda recipes (those old school drug store soda stands) because of the medicinal properties and because it tasted pretty darned good. Today, world calibre chefs try to smuggle the stuff into the US just so they can put a shaving or two on a special dish. It's been used to elevate creams (iced, sauces, etc), custards, anything creamy. It's also even used in cocktails like a gin fizz.
So why am I talking about tonka beans now? Because it contains the same chemical I mentioned in my cinnamon post - coumarin, which in turn is used to make the blood thinning chemical Coumadin, found in Bristol-Meyer Warfarin prescription drugs. Tonka beans have a lot of it too: the average Tonka bean has 2 to 3% of its body weight in coumarin. That's up to 800mg of the stuff per ounce of bean! By comparison, the prescription drug Warfarin has 10mg of Coumadin inside. I guess you can figure out why it's a banned legume in our part of the world!
It's a shame on many levels though, since the taste (and aroma) of tonka beans is one you'll never forget once you've had it. It's one of those spices that has one style of aroma, yet another style of taste. The good news is, in vaping, you can recreate this aroma very well. I'm here to help you out on that!
To create a reasonable facsimile of the tonka bean aroma in your vapes, use a 1:1 ratio of madagascar vanilla with almond (not toasted), and add .25 of ceylon cinnamon. Optionally, you can also add a few drops of clove and/or cherry. The recipe might look like this:
- Madagascar Vanilla (FA) 2%
- Almond (FA) 2%
- Ceylon Cinnamon (FA) .5%
- Optional Clove (any) .15%
- Optional Black Cherry (FA) .15%
That's a base recipe; feel free to 50% more to it, double it, whatever. Feel also free to try different vanillas (or vanillin) or even different cinnamons. You could also just mix up your own batch of concentrated "Tonka Bean" flavouring, going 42.5% Vanilla, 42.5% Almond, 11% cinnamon and the remainder 4% could be clove and black cherry. Then use that premixed concentrate in 2%-8% volumes in any cream based vape recipe you are thinking about.
Tonka bean vaping aroma facsimile. It's like 90% actual Tonka bean, but your liver, kidney and blood will thank you for not using the real thing.
Dude, where did you come from, bearing all this fantastic information?! Your contributions to this community are greatly appreciated!
These posts are awesome, thank you for sharing this! Flavorwest's coumarin pipe tobacco was one of the first flavors i fell in love with, i always thought it was just a funny name! Upon further research Coumarin has anti-fungicidal and anti-tumor activities. And Coumarin is responsible for the sweet smell of new mown hay. Now you have me wanting to try tonka beans, ill definitely have to try this out tomorrow!
I forgot to thank you for your this in your other post, but I've been trying to tell people for a while now that cinnamon is a great flavor to add complexity to their fleshy fruits(especially peach.) If you haven't tried it yet, you should try cinnamon with kiwi.
I don't have kiwi on hand, but I do love how cinnamon plays nice with pear! You really have to get the balance right though, since pear is pretty timid (it can be prominent but can also be overwhelmed). I may order kiwi down the road, thanks for the suggestion!
oooh. % recommendations?
Tonka beans have a similar fragrance with sweet woodruff, TFA have a sweet woodruff, I wonder if they taste the same.
Can you confirm, /u/ilikeycoffee?
Edit: can you confirm that whether your recipe is similar to sweet woodrose? I feel like I needed to clarify my question a little more
I'm afraid I don't have any experience with sweet woodruff (or woodrose), so I couldn't answer! But it's given me a new flavour to go out and discover, which always excites me!
tonka is delicious, it's fairly safe as well when used as a spice. Unmodified coumarin is not something you want to eat in huge doses but tonka beans are not something you would eat in huge doses. a fatal dose of coumarin (which tonka beans contain, coumadin is a chemical derivative of coumarin that acts as an anticoagulant) would take like 25-30+ beans (1g+ coumarin) and they are aromatic enough that a few mg of shavings can flavor a rather large batch of ice cream. Keep in mind as well that 25-30 nutmegs would probably also be fatal
I don't know where you got the 800mg statistic but using your 2-3% of total weight statistic this would make the tonka bean 25 grams in weight! Perhaps there was a math error and you meant a total weight of 2.5 grams (which honestly is still somewhat high) which would give you ~75mg of coumarin per bean. In terms of extracting for vaping I would say that as long as you utilized a small amount (maybe 1-2mg of shavings max) to extract in a carrier like PG the total percentage of coumarin should be safe. However, this would depend on how much PG you use, how readily the coumarin extracts into pg, and (more importantly) how much of it you vape in a day.
Just to reiterate because spellcheck is making this a goddamn nightmare: tonka beans contain couMarin, warfarin contains coumaDin, which is derived from dicoumarol, which is derived from couMarin. couMarin does not have any anticoagulant properties on its own/is not a vitamin K antagonist. It is moderately toxic to liver and kidneys but only in high quantities (~275mg/kg ld50).
otherwise great info though! Interested to try the recipe, just need some almond.
> don't know where you got the 800mg statistic but using your 2-3% of total weight statistic this would make the tonka bean 25 grams in weight! Perhaps there was a math error and you meant a total weight of 2.5 grams (which honestly is still somewhat high) which would give you ~75mg of coumarin per bean.
Hi there! I typed:
> That's up to 800mg of the stuff per ounce of bean!
Which would make your math correct - 1oz=30g.
Thanks for the other info. In this and the cinnamon post, I tried to make the distinction between coumaRin and coumaDin, stating that the latter is a derivative of the former. I'm no chemist; just a food geek. ;)
Rough, tough, Tonkas got the stuff!
Just a warning, I'm going to gush over you in every post I read by you. It's all so intriguing, especially when someone who has very little to no knowledge on the subject (me) reads it. Now I've got to add a few more flavors to my ever-growing list of flavors you recommend. I ain't mad ;)
Thanks again for these informative posts. I followed the link in your earlier post to the wikipedia article on Coumarin. They listed "Sweet Woodruff" as containing the coumarin as well. Incidentally I remember that is a flavor that TFA sells. I haven't myself tried that flavor yet, but found it interesting in the least. I may actually buy that flavor next time I place an order.
Thanks again.
Amazing content.. As someone who has absolutely no clue about flavor profiles and which flavors work well together to create more complex liquids, I rely heavily on people like you. This sub truly is something special! Thank you so much for sharing
So this ended up being more savory than I had imagined but I'm also impatient and will try to report back in a couple days -> week. I hadn't used FA Almond since I got it (saving for a rainbow cookie attempt) recipe (almond cake/paste) after opening it for the first time and taking a whiff as I always do I was instantly smacked with the staple aroma of my grandmother's homemade pignoli cookies also being in the mood for a new cakey vape and loving vanilla I went with this to keep the "tonka" flavor up front:
- 2% FA Vanilla Classic
- 2% FA Almond
- 1% FW Yellow Cake
- 0.5% FA Meringue (the new baked version not the og airy cookie)
Hot water bath for a half hour, rigorously shaken every 10min. Tastes like bland sometimes bitter asshole. Definitely not a shake an vape despite FA's tendency to be so, also might up the cake and have tonka be in the background if it stays so bland tasting.
I'm thinking would be a great "grounding" subtlety to add to tobacco/tea/floral or otherwise earthly tasting juices. Maybe in small percentage 0.5-1% so it stays as an inconspicuous cloying note that I get from it fresh at 2%. I really wish I had any kind of cinnamon to try it with because maybe thats just what I'm missing but commercial juice has steered me away from ever playing with any cinnamon due to the accompanying harshness/throat hit/burn that I get with every cinnamon I've ever tried besides Bearded Vapes No. 32 (cinnamon funnel cake) where it tastes like cinnamon sugar not just spiced.
EDIT: The more I taste this the more I'm intrigued, no longer tasting bitter sweet asshole tang just a dry, bland, yet perplexing flavor, regretting the meringue I think more than anything right now and starting to think it just doesn't belong in any recipe containing vanilla. Very interested to try more things with the FA Almond (pignoli cookie mix definitely coming up in the near future). Gonna just let it steep now :o thanks for the interesting write up.
EDIT2: I think my wick finally broke in, I'm convinced this will go amazing in a nutty tobacco mix such as u/Furyxus/ Crossbones, okay actually just gonna let it steep now, carry on!
Great post as always!
My other major hobby, fragrance collecting, uses Tonka Bean as a note fairly frequently, so I'm very familiar with its lovely aroma. However, I've never tasted a tonka bean, so I'll have to try out your recipe and see what it's like (minus the Ceylon Cinnamon, perhaps with a drop of Rich Cinnamon since it's what I have).
In Germany you can get Waldmeister flavored e-liquids. Waldmeister translates loosely as "forest master" and contains a fair amount of Coumarin.
Hopefully Germany's e-liquids don't contain real Waldmeister because Coumarin isn't just a blood thinner -- it's a lung specific carcinogen. The tobacco industry knowingly included Coumarin in pipe tobacco back in the 60s and 70s.
EDIT: Amazing post, by the way. Thank you.