End of the mystery: the explanation of the unmistakable smell of the Metro premises

In a short walk of ten or fifteen blocks, you will discover a universe of smells. Certain tree smell, yard smell, wet dog smell, garbage smell, candy smell, Starbucks smell, McDonald’s smell, smell of subway.

Telling the smell is difficult. Smells are impossible to describe on their own and always represent something. You will know well Patrick Suskindwriter of “Perfume: the story of a murderer”, who dedicated the first part of his famous novel to tell what Paris was like through smells.

For the smell to transcend the page – or, in this case, the online article – it is necessary to resort to the “cupcake Proust” effect. A trigger of the titanic “In search of lost time” is the aroma. The protagonist of the first volume of Marcel Proust’s novel dips a cupcake in his tea, smells its smell and reminds him, in almost three thousand pages, of various situations in his life.

The connection between a smell and a memory, then, creates the “cupcake Proust” effect, or “Proust phenomenon”.

When we walk through the door of a subway or enter a place, we notice that the characteristic aroma we perceive can only be thought of or mentioned as “the smell of the subway”. Within a few days we smell a similar fragrance somewhere else and our brain immediately thinks of 6 or 12 inch turkey, meatballs or vegetable sandwiches.

However, to try to explain it you can also refer to other things. A scientific study published in the journal PLOS One has established that humans can perceive odors grouped into ten categories: fragrant or floral, woody or resinous, fruity, chemical, mentholated or refreshing, sweet, burnt or smoky, citrusy, rotten, pungent or rancid. It can be said, exaggerating a little, that The subway has a little bit of everything.

a confused scent

Just like fingerprints, there are as many interpretations of Subway’s smell as there are people. Who writes to them is: “The smell of Subway is the product of the mixture of all the vegetables and sauces offered by the sandwich chain”. and it is very wrong.

It is difficult to understand which elements cause the invasive fragrance for the simple fact that it does not come from a flavoring, as do the characteristic smells of the Hotel Faena or the Patio Bullrich, to name two good examples of Buenos Aires.

There are several interesting attempts on the Quora website to solve this puzzle.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if they ‘created’ that smell, or at least chemically enhanced it, in the same way that Porsche ‘designs’ the sound of its cars,” says David, going all out.

“Bread always smells good, but it comes from a scented spray, not what you get. I saw them draw and make aerosols, ”says another person with very different ideas from this:“ My car, ALL my laundry and my shoes smell of bread and old mustard ”. Others blame the sugar; some celebrate oregano.

The truth about Milan… sandwich

Many users who have posted on the Quora forum have come close to answering our question, but these have been left out for a bit of intrigue. The one who discovered the trick (or at least who explained it first in detail) was, on the other hand, an Australian journalist named Joel Burrows.

In an investigation for Vice, the young Burrows set out to find out where the distinctive smell of each subway location comes from … and did this.

He first called 100 subway offices to ask their employees where the smell was coming from. Conclusion: more than seventy did not answer; the rest offered various possibilities. Some told him it was a secret, others attributed it to the mix of sandwiches and biscuits, some to baked bread and one specifically to chicken.

Not happy with the employee’s response, Burrows went to several subways to get the raw dough they cook bread and cookies with. They didn’t give it to him. “It was as if the employees wanted their smell to remain secret,” comments the reporter in his article.

There is no better phrase than “neither boring nor lazy” to continue the story. The next thing the sandwich researcher did was the recipe for subway loaves and cookies on the Internet. He bought everything he had to buy and started cooking them at home to see if he could smell a private smell?.

He was slowly coming to the truth.

Initially the dough he had cooked didn’t smell like Subway, but when he sprinkled “some Italian herbs on the bread” his house started to have a “faint” Subway smell, which then intensified when he put the mixture in the oven.

The breads and biscuits were delicious – he ate them himself – but they didn’t end up giving off the same smell as that of the branches of the subway.

But the course of the mission changed when the young man abandoned everything and hours later, before repeating the formula, his nose noticed that the oven, belatedly, it gave off the fragrance I was looking for so much.

“I was ecstatic – I did it,” Burrows said when he realized his win.

The famous Subway smell appeared when the reporter simultaneously baked the four different types of Subway bread and the typical biscuits – or biscuits – of the chain..

chemistry question

To register the smell, the boy turned to CSIRO’s Food Innovation Center, a network facility that works with the Australian food and beverage industry to help companies make food safer, fresher and healthier.

Equipped with the technology needed to identify the specific compounds emanating from Subway, the Dr. Tanoj Singh aided the researcher by using a probe (a pen-like object that “traps” odors on its tip).

Singh’s tiny element then identified about 20 different chemicals in Subway, according to the Vice article.

What he found looks like the one he uses the Professor Utonio from The Powerpuff Girls to create “the perfect baby”: there were 2-methylbutanal, 3-methylbutanal and benzaldehyde.

In the doctor’s words, the first two are released from food when heated, which produces a “pleasant toasty aroma”. This perfume, mixed with the “nutty and almond aroma” of benzaldehyde and acetic and butanoic acid found in condiments and cheeses, creates the unmistakable Subway smell.

end of the mystery.

We now know why this American sandwich bar chain takes over, like bars like El gato negro or Café Sastre in Buenos Aires, a piece of the block. It is enough for the door to be open and for Professor Utonio on duty to mix well what he has to mix.