This is part of project I agreed to take on after it was pointed out that so many of the resources in sidebar and wiki are ancient. The idea is, rather than revising them myself, I'd post them here once per week to gather feedback on how to improve them. They belong to all of us, everyone should have a say in what they say.
Last week, we talked about how to bring a section of the DIY Beginner's Guide called "Mixing that First Bottle" up to date. Now the Beginner's Guide temporarily has a link to that Throwback Thursday post (until I, or some brave volunteer, has time to actually re-write that article), so new mixers visiting it will have both the old content and a direct link to your suggestions for modernizing it.
The next link in the guide, "How to make e-liquid out of your favorite recipe" takes readers to a 3+ year old post by Returnity, one of our absentee moderators. I'll paste it all here for your convenience. Please read it with these questions like these in mind: Should this even be in the beginner's guide? Should it be revised? Would it suffice to merely repost the old article and open it up to modern-day comments, then put a link to that in the guide, as I've temporarily done with the "Mixing first bottle" section. How would you recommend revising it so it doesn't read like a Flavour Art advertisement and teach new mixers to create cartoonishly Head in Clouds circa 2015-ish type recipes? Are other, less representational, approaches to mixing equally valid and worthy of just as much attention as the effort to mimic culinary recipes? Things to ponder.
Here it is:
> Let’s talk about why I like FA flavors, and how I’ve moved on from just basic DIY and guessing at recipes to making my own creations. > > FA flavors kick ass for a few reasons. > > 1) They’re all pretty strong and consistent in potency, meaning you can generally get accurate ratios between ingredients without a lot of guesswork or experimentation. > > 2) Most FA flavors are very realistic and faithful to what they’re supposed to be, and they interact together well as building blocks for a recipe. > > 3) FA has nearly everything you could want for mixing recipes, so you don’t need to venture outside of their realm for much, unless you have specific preferences for other flavors (we all do). > > Now that my FA advert is over, let’s talk about the meat of this subject. How to become a DIY god, and tap into the infinite reserves of recipes available on the internet (real recipes, not juice recipes). I think the best way to demonstrate what I mean here is by using an example recipe, an a pretty easy one at that. > > I’ll pick something simple, that we all love: Lemon Meringue Pie - I linked to a random recipe I grabbed off AllRecipes, a glorious resource for the enlightened DIY’er. Here’s the breakdown: > > - Sugar > > - Flour > > - Cornstarch (discard this) > > - Salt (discard this) > > - Eggs > > - Lemon > > - Butter > > - Pie Crust > > These are our building blocks for DIY greatness. Let’s take a look at our FA arsenal, and saw what we can do here. The best way to go about this is too look at the cooking directions (check the link) to see what ingredients are used for what purpose, and break it down like that. > > - Sugar + Egg Whites = FA Meringue > > - Lemon = FA Lemon Sicily > > - Pie Crust = FA Apple Pie + FA Cookie (or TFA Pie Crust, if you prefer) > > - Butter + Flour + Egg Yolks = FA Custard + FA Vienna Cream (or CAP Vanilla Custard, if you prefer) > > Now, just like that, we’ve got an ingredients list, and now it’s up to us to use our experience and experimentation to figure out percentages. This is where the aforementioned consistency of FA ingredients comes in really handy, like I mentioned. Because (generally) you can assume equal parity between the potency of most FA ingredients, within reason, you can build up a base recipe from scratch using a bit of good judgement and logic, along with the quantities in the original food/drink and your knowledge of the flavors. > > Here’s a starter Lemon Meringue Pie recipe to get you going, based off this exercise: > > - FA Lemon Sicily - 4.5% > > - FA Custard - 2.5% > > - FA Vienna Cream - 1% > > - FA Meringue - 1.5% > > - FA Apple Pie - 0.75% > > - FA Cookie - 0.75% > > I can’t promise this initial recipe will be exactly to your taste, but the joy of mixing like this, and the pleasure of FA ingredients, is that it will almost certainly be GOOD. It will give you a solid base to build upon from there, to get exactly what you want. Need more citrus kick? Trim down the Lemon and bump up a percent of Lime Cold-Pressed to enhance it. Want more Pie Crust? Easy, add TFA Pie Crust or increase the Apple Pie/Cookie combo by 0.25% each. Not creamy enough? More Vienna Cream or add FA Cream Fresh. > > It’s a brave new world! Start googling, and unchain yourself from asking for people to give you recipe templates to work off when you want a new flavor! The possibilities are endless!
There's just so much to scrap there... "we all love", the FA nonsense where INW and FLV mostly are better (with a few exceptions)... the culinary recipe...
The basic approach to creating a recipe really comes down to whether it's a clone attempt or a replication of something existing IRL or something original. So.. for a clone the first step is identify the primary flavor (other than sucralose) and isolate what the concentrate is the provides that. Then figure out the support flavors and figure out the right concentrates for each, one after another. Then spend forever getting the percentages dialed in, then add 2% CAP SS and call it a day. For replicating something from IRL the process is sorta similar - identify the primary flavor, pick the right concentrate(s), get that dialed in, add supportin flavors, tweak. Lastly there's the truly original approach. This is where you want to create something that is unique - Grack is a perfect example, but... - usually this type of recipe is inspired by somehow identifyingtwo or more flavors that are unusual to combine but compliment one another nicely... then finding other flavors to round it all out into something really wild. This type of recipe is almost always a result of serendipity. One last one I forgot - the remix. Basically take some existing recipe, deconstruct it, substitute other concentrates to fill the roles other ones played in the original, and test. It may be better, it may not.
Grack immediately came to mind when I was re-reading this old thing. If everyone mixed the way this is suggesting, there'd never have been a Grack Juice, no Coop's Kiwi Bourbon, no Fiestas & Fiascos...
Basically, the whole original version needs to go and be replaced, or presented as another alternative approach (albeit a somewhat more challenging one, as it requires choosing flavor concentrates all at once to rather than sequentially). Feel free to clean up the previous post I did, expand on it where you think it best, but I'm fairly certain those were the normal approaches to recipe design.
I think the biggest problem with this article is that it encourages people to mix based off of what concentrates are named, not what they taste like. Frankly this is what a lot of us try to do when we're just starting out, and then we find it just isn't intuitive like this. I've found lately that I have more luck in trying to separate out core flavors to try to find the right balance in them, and then build the rest of the recipe out. So if I were doing a lemon meringue pie, I'd probably focus a lot on getting the lemon meringue filling right, and try to layer on a good pie crust after.
Technically, the meringue is the topping, the lemon curd is the filling, and then there's the crust. Three separate elements.
Hah, that's actually very informative...I've never actually had lemon meringue pie.
Ok. You need to move to a better universe, where such things aren't possible.
Anyhow... Pie crust is pretty universal. So we'll skip over that. The lemon curd is sort of a cross between Jello and pudding... like a creamy Jello. It's slightly translucent, has sufficient surface tension to hold it together (but barely, so if it shakes too much it'll run a bit) and is simultaneously tart and insanely sweet. Meringue is a fluffy white substance, kinda like styrofoam, only with a load of sugar in it. It's basically a egg white foam lattice held together by sugar. This substance covers the lemon filling the way the top crust of a more traditional fruit pie works.
Wow you weren't joking about the FA advert, lol.
I would lose all of this:
>Let’s talk about why I like FA flavors, and how I’ve moved on from just basic DIY and guessing at recipes to making my own creations.
>FA flavors kick ass for a few reasons.
>1) They’re all pretty strong and consistent in potency, meaning you can generally get accurate ratios between ingredients without a lot of guesswork or experimentation.
>2) Most FA flavors are very realistic and faithful to what they’re supposed to be, and they interact together well as building blocks for a recipe.
>3) FA has nearly everything you could want for mixing recipes, so you don’t need to venture outside of their realm for much, unless you have specific preferences for other flavors (we all do).
>Now that my FA advert is over, let’s talk about the meat of this subject. How to become a DIY god, and tap into the infinite reserves of recipes available on the internet (real recipes, not juice recipes).
My edit would go something like this:
As with other non-culinary pursuits that involve creating pleasing flavour profiles, such as making cocktails, there is inspiration to be gleaned from food recipes. Not only can we use classic pairings of flavours, but we can approximate the ratios that will give us the most pleasing end result.
Let's take a lemon meringue pie as our inspiration for this example.
- FA Lemon Sicily - 4.5%
- FA Custard - 2.5%
- FA Vienna Cream - 1%
- FA Meringue - 1.5%
- FA Apple Pie - 0.75%
- FA Cookie - 0.75%
This is a balance of flavours that somewhat represents the ratios of their real world counterparts. The next step is to give them a few days to come together, and see if we need to change anything to suit our preferences. Too much lemon? Bring it down 0.5% for your next batch. Not sweet enough? Consider adding a small amount of sweetner for your next iteration of the recipe. This is how recipes are refined and developed beyond the point of "eh, good enough". Take an idea, try it out, tweak it, repeat.
We are lucky in the world of DIY ejuice making, in that the vast majority of our flavours were developed to be used in food, so we have a huge range of flavours to play with, and the context of real food and drink recipes to guide our hand when it comes to that first intimidating try at making an original recipe.
Please don't take any of this as discouragement from experimenting with odd/new combinations of flavours. We are lucky to have all of these things to play with, it'd be a shame if there weren't people willing to create ~~batshit crazy~~ unusual recipes like Grack Juice and Pickle Rick.
Just realised I've spelled "flavours" like the limey tea drinker I am. Feel free to Americanize. :)
Also, any criticism/edit suggestions are very welcome.
I'm not sure about entirely leaving out the culinary recipe that shows the thought process here, but I love the rest of your edit.
I think the culinary analogy is necessary here but the approach is all wrong.
As a mixer I look for specific elements of a finished product that I want to recreate in vape form. Specific culinary ingredients don't matter as much to us as the elements of the finished product do. We don't have a flour and shortening concentrate, nor a way to bake it. We have pie crusts, cookies, and graham crackers.
Instead of wasting words talking about ingredients of the item being recreated, talk more about the elements and ask/answer questions about them. For example:
Pie crust - is it Graham, is it cookie, is it pastry? It's pastry so we need to make a choice along those lines. Pie Crust, Zeppola, AP, and some darker cookies may work here.
Custard - We all know that custard is usually eggs and cream but which custard(s) and which lemon(s). We may be able to use a Lemon Meringue concentrate and boost elements or build your own with something like FA Custard (already has lemon note) or a combination of light custards and creams.
Lemon - We know we need lemon here, but which one? We're already throwing sweet ingredients around so that's a consideration here. Candy lemons may go even further candy. We want realistic, like FE Lemon, FA Lemon Sicily, or INW Lemon Mix.
Meringue/caramelized meringue - Meringue is fairly easy as we have concentrates but which is the best and how do we add the browned caramel bits? My vote is always FA Meringue. It's superior in all ways in everything. Don't even try to argue with me. We may need to boost it with other flavors to get the intended results. Toasted Marshmallow, Marshmallow and Whipped Creams can work here.
I just threw this all together but dazcole's [recipe] (https://alltheflavors.com/recipes/80590#lemon_tart_remixed_by_dazcole) would be a good example for sure.
I really feel like this is the best approach to coming up with a recipe, and you worded it a lot better than I would have.
If I want to create a recipe based on a real-life food, I’m less concerned with individual ingredients and more concerned with the unique characteristics and qualities that the ingredients offer. I’m not going to look for and find a concentrate that mimics, say, flour, but I can find something that offers a baked, doughy taste.
You can try to copy actual food recipes, and it might work, but you’re really restricting yourself when doing that. And I think that’s what separates “meh” juices from great juices.
I have to unchain myself? sheesh
This is interesting, because it’s very different than how I approach a new recipe. I think it might work better for bakery items. My method usually goes like this: I start with a taste in mind, usually something non-vaping-related like a dessert I had or a drink I like. I either search for a single flavor concentrate that evokes that sense memory, or I come across one by accident, and then I start the process of adding any additional concentrates by asking “what is this missing?” and “what flavor(s) can I use to fill in those gaps?”
I like Returnity’s approach, though. I’ve never tried to plan the components that would be needed from the start. I think it might lead to a more organized recipe, but also might pigeon-hole me too early in the process.
Also, it has another major flaw - let's say I want to create a Zombie (mmrH? No. The other kind.) juice. Now, using a ratio of flavorings such that I'm adding way more rum flavorings than pineapple would he called for... but what if I have some exceptionally weak pineapple juice flavor, and insanely concentrated rum flavors? It could happen.
Ok, maybe I'd have been better off using a Alabama Slammer recipe in place of the Zombie, but our get the idea. Maybe if you want to make all-FA recipes the approach works nine times out of ten... but with the massive selection of flavors now available (and the desirability of minimizing the use of FA flavors (fuck FANA))... There's just a bunch of flaws.
I’m more of a complete noob when it comes to mixing, I’ve been relying on mixing other popular recipes from the top mixers, such as, u/id10-t and u/concreteriver. From all of the reading I’ve done over the past month I can only assume that we need three things to mix a recipe, a base, top note, and undertone/finish.
So when I begin to mix a recipe I try to find the concentrates that will fit the bill. If I’m wanting an ice cream, I’ll start with VBIC(TPA) 4%-5%, maybe some (TPA) cheesecake graham crust 2% for a starting base. Then, I would add whatever too note that I would want example Strawberry (TPA) @ 4%, (TPA) Strawberry Ripe @ 4-5%. I would sample that and tweak what I felt needed to be tweaked. Would this be the way that u/id10-t would approach building a recipe?