Flavor profile
What Flavor Is Red Velvet?
A mild cocoa cake with a tang, a disputed history, and a color that is harder to make than the flavor.
What flavor is red velvet?
Red velvet tastes of mild cocoa, buttermilk tang and vanilla, usually under a tangy cream cheese frosting. It is a lightly chocolate cake, and the red is almost always added color.
Flavor profile
- Family
- Dessert
- Character
- Light cocoa, buttery and gently sour, with vanilla; a cultured cream cheese note when frosted
- Key components
- Cocoa, lactic and acetic acid, diacetyl from cultured dairy, vanillin
- Impact
- Low to medium
- Typical dosage
- Application-specific; the cocoa and acid are usually ingredients, with flavor used for the cream cheese and vanilla notes
- Heat stability
- Good for the flavor; the red color is the weak point
- pH stability
- Flavor good; natural red colors are pH-sensitive
- Natural availability
- Flavor yes; a bake-stable natural red takes testing
What separates red velvet from chocolate cake is how little chocolate is in it. Recipes use a small amount of cocoa, plus buttermilk and often a splash of vinegar. You get a soft crumb, a slight sourness and only a gentle cocoa note.
What you are tasting
| Note | Where it comes from |
|---|---|
| Light cocoa | A small amount of cocoa powder |
| Tang | Buttermilk and vinegar, which bring lactic and acetic acid |
| Buttery | Butter, plus diacetyl from the cultures in buttermilk |
| Vanilla | Vanilla extract or vanillin |
| Cream cheese | The frosting: lactic tang and dairy fat |
The frosting matters more than people expect. Most modern recipes use cream cheese frosting. Older ones used ermine icing, a cooked flour-and-milk frosting that is far less tangy. Strip away the frosting and the color, and what is left is a mild cocoa and vanilla cake. Compare yellow cake, which has no cocoa and gets its character from butter and egg.
Where it came from is disputed
Nobody has documented who made it first. The main claims:
- The Waldorf-Astoria in New York says it has served the cake since the 1920s. Some food writers date its appearance there to the 1930s.
- Eaton's, the Toronto department store, sold it as its own house recipe.
- Adams Extract, a Texas extract and food-coloring company, promoted a red velvet recipe from around the 1940s. It used plenty of the company's red coloring. This is the best-documented commercial link.
"Velvet" cakes, named for a fine, soft crumb, existed earlier. Some accounts say cocoa with buttermilk gave those cakes a reddish-brown tint. The 1989 film Steel Magnolias is often credited with reviving interest.
Why the red is the hard part
Older explanations say natural cocoa turned red in an acidic batter. That is contested. Some testers report no visible color change from cocoa and acid alone. Either way, most cocoa used today is alkalized, which darkens it, so the red in a modern product is added.
Each way of adding it has a cost:
- Certified colors such as Red 40 are bright and bake-stable.
- Beet fades in the oven, because its pigment breaks down with heat. Its sugars can also brown. The center of a cupcake can come out dull while the edges stay pink.
- Anthocyanin colors shift toward purple and blue as pH rises. Baking soda pushes batter pH up. Acidified versions help, but change the taste.
- Carmine is bright and heat-stable. It comes from insects, so it rules out vegan and kosher claims and can complicate halal certification. In the US it must be declared by name, as "carmine" or "cochineal extract".
- Heat-stabilized vegetable-juice reds are sold for bakery use. Run your own bake tests at your own pH.
Red velvet outside a cake
In coffee, ice cream, cookies and protein products, "red velvet" usually means cake plus cream cheese frosting. A red velvet-type flavor is commonly built as light cocoa, vanilla and a cultured cream cheese note.
There is no single agreed red velvet flavor. Some people expect more chocolate, others more cream cheese. Decide which one you are making before you brief it. Without the red, most customers will not recognize the flavor, so the color plan has to be settled as early as the flavor.