The Production of Worcestershire Sauce: An Overview

As promised, I will be writing today about the production of Worcestershire Sauce. I will give you a brief history, a description of the ingredients, and a summary of how some of them are made. I hope this is an enjoyable process for us all.

In his book on the sauce, Brian Keogh writes that Worcestershire sauce was first "synthesized" by two chemists, John Wheeley Lea and William Henry Perkins of Worcester, England. The Brits have a funny way of adding "shire" to the end of names. I'm not much for history, but I will note that Heinz (of ketchup fame) bought the rights to Worcestershire sauce in 2005 and now distributes it with the words, "The Original Lea & Perrins Worcestershire Sauce" on the bottle. I stumbled upon a bottle recently that must have been from before the Heinz takeover: it reads "The Original & Genuine Lea & Perkins."

Today a bottle of the sauce lists these ingredients: vinegar, molasses, high fructose corn syrup, anchovies, water, onions, salt, garlic, tamarind concentrate, cloves, natural flavorings, and chili pepper extract. The bottle that I referenced earlier lists mostly the same ingredients, but differs in containing hydrolyzed soy protein and eschalots and lacking cloves and chili pepper extract. It is pretty clear that Heinz is not selling "The Original Lea & Perkins," but it would be naive to expect anything different.

Vinegar is a good place to start, as it is the primary ingredient (other than water). Vinegar is a particularly interesting product from an engineering standpoint, as it requires three steps of biological growth during production, each of which must be carefully controlled to achieve the desired results. Typical malt vinegar is actually produced in a manner similar to the production of beer. Barley is first malted, which involves moistening the barley in large troughs and heating the environment. Moistening causes the barley (the seeds of the barley plant) to sprout, growing little shoots from the body of the grains. To provide energy for this process, enzymes in the grains break down stored starch into simple sugars such as maltose. The hope of life for the little barley grains does not last long, however; for all its efforts, the brewer will heat and kill the grains when they have broken down enough starch into sugar. The dry heat roasts the barley, and the degree of roasting determines many characteristics of the brew. As the sugars caramelize, more roasting generally corresponds to a darker beer, and a wide variety of flavors can be created in the roasting process alone.

Next comes the filtering process. Water is used to remove the new sugars from the barley, and filters retain the solids of the grains. The resulting solution contains sugars and proteins from the barley. The sugar water is then given to yeast, much like the yeast used to rise bread, and the microbes convert the sugar into ethanol, the common alcohol that makes my whiskey so wonderful. Humans and other multicellular organisms convert sugar into carbon dioxide that leaves the body through breathing. All of the carbon that is present in sugar reacts to form carbon dioxide. This is a very useful reaction for us, since carbon dioxide contains a lot less energy than sugar. Recall that energy is never created or destroyed, so the difference in chemical energy shows up elsewhere. Through the reactions of metabolism, body can convert the chemical energy in to all sorts of forms: most of it is turned into heat energy that warms the body or simply floats off; some of it goes to repairing and generating cells and tissue; and a little of it goes to mechanical energy like running, jumping, and playing. Yeast, it seems, is not quite as lucky. Instead of turning all of the carbon in sugar into carbon dioxide, some of it stays in the form of ethanol. Since ethanol has more chemical energy than carbon dioxide, less energy is available to yeast for every sugar molecule it can get a hold of. One advantage is that yeast does not require nearly as much oxygen as multicellular organisms, allowing it to live in a greater variety of environments.

Energy aside, yeast does turn sugar into ethanol and carbon dioxide. In the brewing of beer, this would be the end of the story. The beer would be bottled and shipped. However, in making vinegar, the ethanol is delivered to another set of organisms called acetogenic bacteria. Don't let the name fool you; acetogenic bacteria make acetic acid as a result of their form of metabolism, using the carbon from ethanol in this case. If yeast were unfortunate because of their way of making a living, these bacteria are even more so. Acetogenesis produces even less energy than fermentation, but fortunately the energy needs of bacteria are even less than those of yeast. Acetic acid gives vinegar its sour flavor, and the host of other compounds such as carmelized sugar produced in the brewing process give malt vinegar its other flavors.

I want to elucidate another very important ingredient of Worcestershire Sauce, one that finds its way into a multitude of other foods. Surely if you are fastidious and obsessive like me, you have noticed the "natural flavors" phrase tacked onto the end of a great many ingredient lists. My limited knowledge of the food and chemical industries has shown me how misleading this phrase can be. Any flavoring that comes from a biological source can be called a natural flavoring. This is in contrast to artificial flavorings that are synthesized through controlled reactions and use other chemicals as starting materials. I have actually had the opportunity on two occasions to synthesize the artificial banana flavoring found most obviously in banana Runts candy, and the second time I was able to walk out of the laboratory with a vial of the stuff for my friends to see (or rather smell). If the chemical synthesis of flavorings sounds unappealing, believe me that the methods of producing natural flavors are no better. In completely unnatural processes, solvents that are often dangerous or unhealthy are used to extract flavorings , and these must be removed properly for the "natural flavoring" to be fit for consumption. A prime analog is the removal of caffeine to produce decaf coffee. The solvent that is often used, dichloromethane, falls into the class of chemicals called halocarbons that gained so much notoriety for destroying the ozone layer. Furthermore, edible solvents can cause problems as well during extraction. If ethanol were used to remove flavors from fruits with seeds such as apples or peaches, it is very likely that cyanide, a potent poison, would be extracted along with the flavors. I certainly hope that food producers would have more sense than this, however. I hope I haven't scared you with any of this information, but I did want to dispel any illusion that natural flavors are somehow safer than their artificial counterparts.

So there you have it. I have told you a little about Worcestershire Sauce, and some of the steps that go into making it. I realize that I have left many steps and much subtlety out of the brewing process, but that discussion goes way beyond this note. Information about the other ingredients is easy to come by with a quick internet search, and I chose the ingredients I did because I feel I have an extended knowledge of them. Next week, tune in for an overview of the current scientific research in chemical engineering departments. I know you can't wait for that one!