Cream Soda tastes buttery

Trying to sort out a cream soda recipe. Its simple enough:
16 oz sugar
16 oz water
1Tbsp of Orange juice
1 tsp Mexican vanilla extract
Pinch of salt

Add 4 oz water to the sugar and Melt the sugar and boil to 300f. Add remaining water, vanilla, salt.

Resulting syrup is like caramel buttered popcorn. Where'd the butter and popcorn come from?

Original recipe called for lemon juice instead of OJ. Might try that next, just didn't have a lemon handy.

 

You probably caramelized the sugar a bit during the boil. What's in the Mexican vanilla extract? Anything besides vanilla?

 

It did get a slight bit yellow and did get a tad darker on one of the edges during the boil.

The ingredients for the vanilla are organic vanilla, purified water and alcohol.

 

I would point to the salt as the culprit. That's likely to put your flavor towards buttered popcorn vs. a caramel/cream flavor.

Any reason for boiling to 300°F? Typically if I go above 250°F, it starts to darken significantly and I end up getting some flavors that lean more toward burned sugar than caramel.

I would think that more vanilla would give you a creamier flavor, I usually use a full oz (about 9 times what you're using) for that amount of sugar.

 

No reason for the temp other than that was what the recipe called for. Seemed high, but figured I'd do the recipe as is first and ask what changes to try later.

Salt was also in the recipe and it made sense at the time. I don't know much about soda, but it helps add dimension to some sweets and baked goods. I'll try it without this time.

That's a ton of vanilla you're using when I think about how much I use in baking! I'll change the temp and subtract the salt first, and then experiment with the vanilla after that. Awesome thing about soda...doesn't take 4 weeks to taste the results.

Thanks for the help!

 

Follow up. I pretty much followed the same recipe with the following changes:

1 Tbsp of vanilla (=15mL)

Boiled the sugar until 230F.

Didn't add salt.

Tastes much better. I think the advice about adding more vanilla is solid. Even this batch could maybe use a little more flavor. If not from vanilla, from something else (I might try again with some honey). I did try a small portion of the cream soda syrup with salt and didn't really notice a difference I guess. At least I'm sure that it didn't make it taste like popcorn. I'll chalk this up to the sugar boil temp.