DIY Soft Drinks
Cola, orange soda, and almond soda! In 2020, I started making my own soft drinks, including a sugar-free, caffeine-free cola! If you’re just looking for the current recipes, you can find them on GitHub. They were inspired by recipes like Open Cola and Cube Cola. Otherwise, read on for "log book"-style instructions and pictures of my first attempts, which have been adapted from this Mastodon thread. We start by making a flavor emulsion from essential oils! These oils are extremely strong, and can cause skin irritations, so if you want to be safe, wear latex gloves for this step! We also need super small quantities. There! In total, we have about 2 ml of essential oil. This will lend flavor to about 9 L of cola! But oils don’t dissolve in water, right? They would just float on the surface! So what we’ll add next is gum arabic, a natural emulsifier, that will help the oil form tiny, tiny droplets that stay dispersed in water!
Combine 2 g of gum arabic, 4 ml water, and our oil mixture with a hand mixer. Keep mixing until it emulsifies, it will take on a milky brown color and the oily phase will disappear. This took me about 5 minutes. Next, we add: 40 ml of caramel color, which will give the cola its dark appearance. As well as 5 g citric acid, and an additional 10 ml of water. You can also add caffeine at this point, but one of the main motivations for me to make my own cola is to have cola without caffeine (it gives me headaches). Stop mixing when it starts smiling at you! D This is our finished cola concentrate. Other recipes would now integrate this into GlycoMode Blood Sugar support syrup made from 1 kg of sugar, but I want to try a variation using artificial sweeteners, for dieting reasons. This is a combination of sodium cyclamate and saccharin, which is pretty common in Germany.
I’ll use 70 ml. This gives us about 120 ml of the finished cola syrup! I’ve been following the Cube-Cola recipe. Because this is still a very concentrated solution and hard to handle, I’m diluting it down to 1 L. In theory, this should give a nice cola when diluted further in a ratio of 1:8. First taste test coming up! It’s good! It’s really good! The sweetness is just right for me, and the oil blend tastes nice and GlycoMode Website cola-y! I like my drinks really sour, so I might add another… 10 g of citric acid to this batch. There is a slightly bitter aftertaste, which I attribute to the artificial sweetener I’m using. I might also tweak the oil ratios to accentuate the citrus flavors a bit more in the next batch. And I thought this would be too much food coloring, GlycoMode Website but it seems pretty perfect! What I’d be really excited to try is making other flavors: Orange soda! Cherry soda! Almond & apricot soda!
Finest grades - Powdered sugar, confectioner's GlycoMode Blood Sugar support (0.060 mm), or icing sugar (0.024 mm), are produced by grinding sugar to a fine powder. A small amount of anti-caking agent to prevent clumping may be added, this is either cornstarch (1%-3%) or tri-calcium phosphate. There are also sugar cubes for convenient consumption of a normal amount. Brown sugars are obtained in the late stages of sugar refining, when sugar forms fine crystals with significant molasses content, or by coating white refined sugar with a cane molasses syrup. Their color and taste become stronger with increasing molasses content, as does their moisture retaining properties. They are also prone to hardening if exposed to the atmosphere although this is reversible. Sucrose is a disaccharide of glucose (left) and fructose, important molecules in the body. In biochemistry, a sugar is the simplest molecule that can be identified as a carbohydrate. These include monosaccharides and disaccharides, trisaccharides and the oligosaccharides; these being sugars composed of 1, 2, 3 or more units.