Domestic Lab Rat

There are many reasons to try experimenting in the kitchen. In this case, making your own soda is cheaper, more nutritious, and offers a greater flavor variety than store-bought sodas. Basically, this just water with some bubbles and flavor, and is a lot of fun to make!

The bubbles in store-bought sodas are made by adding carbon dioxide gas to a flavored based under high pressure. The gas dissolves into the liquid – you can get a similar effect at home using one of these seltzer makers. However, I like to use a trick that has been around for thousands of years: yeast. Yeast makes bubbles in beer, and yeast can also make bubbles in your homemade soda.

How does this work? Yeast, like humans, obtain energy from breaking down sugar molecules. This requires oxygen, and is known as aerobic respiration. If there is no oxygen around, humans will die. Yeast however, have a metabolic trick that allows them to survive: in the absence of oxygen, yeast can derive energy from sugar in a process known as anaerobic respiration, or fermentation. The two byproducts of yeast fermentation are ethanol (alcohol) and carbon dioxide (fizzy bubbles). When making soda at home, we will let our mixture ferment for ~24 hours. This is enough time for the yeast to produce a lot of bubbles, but only a tiiiiiny trace of alcohol:

Materials you will need:

2-liter plastic soda bottle
Water
Sugar (or honey, turbinado sugar, agave nectar………)
Flavorings (herbs, fruit, syrups)
Yeast – preferably champagne yeast from a store that carries brewing supplies. Baker’s yeast will do in a pinch.

Steps:

1. Clean your equipment. For making soda, you don’t need to sterilize everything with bleach (like you would for homebrewing beer or wine), but make sure everything is clean.

2. In a pot, add ~1.75 liters of water, and all of the flavorings you plan to use. Bring the mixture up to a simmer, and let it bubble for 30 seconds. Turn off the heat and let the mixture cool.

3. In a separate bowl, dissolve 1.4 teaspoon of yeast into a small amount of warm water. When the yeast is dissolved, add it to the cooled soda base.

4. Pour the completed soda base into the 2-Liter bottle, and close the cap tightly. Let the bottle sit for 24 to 48 hours. The amount of time is variable, depending on the temperature of your kitchen, etc. At first, the carbon dioxide we be produced as a gas, and will increase the pressure in the bottle. Once enough pressure has been built up, newly produced carbon dioxide will begin to dissolve into the soda base.

You can monitor the fermentation by squeezing the bottle – it should start to feel firm, just like a commercial soda bottle would. Enjoy!

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Note 1: When you open the soda bottle, there will be a lot of initial fizz. However, if you pour a glass out, and the soda is pretty flat, don’t worry. All this means is that the yeast needs more time. Put the cap back on, and let it go another day. Play around and have fun – since yeast are alive, some days they will produce more bubbles than other days.

Note 2: If you use fruit puree or other “chunky” ingredients, you can filter the cooled soda base through a cheesecloth if you wish. The resulting soda will be smoother. Just like buying orange juice, you can choose pulp or no pulp.

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Recently I made a Blueberry-Ginger-Lemon Sparkler. In a pot I combined:

1.75 L water, 1 cup frozen blueberries (pureed in blender), 1 inch chunk of ginger (grated), 1/4 cup sugar, and 1/2 lemon (whole). I brought the mixture to a simmer – behold the cauldron…..

Then, I added 1/4 tsp champagne yeast which I dissolved first in a little warm water. I added the yeast to the *cooled* soda base (minus the lemon half) and pour into a clean 2 L soda bottle. I went to sleep, and the yeast went to work. The next day, I had:

More fermentation resources:

NOVA’s blog has a post on 45-million year old beer

Matt’s blog Brew and Bake had wonderfully detailed instructions for making your own beer!

Craftzine offers a cool video for making soda using a similar technique.

Remember those commercials advertising how you can clean an entire sink of dishes with just a spoonful of soap? Have you ever tried this? It really works. Yes, really.

But it took me a while to figure this out. I have always used waaaaaaay too much soap. I would put a drop into every drinking glass, and on top of every plate. My dishes were sparkling clean. But after some experiments, I found that I can use ten times less soap. My dishes were just as clean, but they were a lot easier to rinse off and I have not purchased Palmolive in a loooong time. Stick with me, and learn why such a little amount is truly needed.

Without soap, how will my dishes get clean? Turns out, there are a lot of thing happening when you do your dishes.

First, plain old water helps to dissolve your crusty food. Often, I’ll fill up a particularly nasty pot with water and let it “soak” overnight. Although I do this mainly because I’m lazy, there is actually a lot of chemistry happening. Water, all by itself, is a solvent – it will dissolve many different types of food. Also, using warm or hot water accelerates this process:

Next, your hands do a lot of the heavy lifting. Whether you use a sponge, a scrubby-thingy, or a cloth, all of that manpower removes stuck on bits of food.

Finally, although water is one of the best solvents out there, there are some things that water cannot handle, namely oil. Since oil and water don’t mix, in order to remove oil from your dishes it takes a special kind of molecule. This is where soap comes in. There are various types of soap and detergents, but their unifying characteristic is that each molecule contains two portions. One portion of the molecule, known as the tail, is hydrophobic. Hydrophobic substances are attracted to oily and greasy things. The “head” of the molecule, however, is composed of many atoms including hydrogen and oxygen (hey, that’s what water is made of!). It makes sense, then, that the head of the molecule is hydrophilic and is attracted to water, and will bond to water and most other food particles.

Soap molecule from here

So as your scrubbing your plates, the little soap molecules will mix with the greasy food molecules, and everything will be easily rinsed off. This is the only role of the soap – as I mentioned above, most of the work is done by the water, and your hands. Therefore, its not necessary to use a lot of the stuff. Seriously, only a little bit is needed. Here’s how you can S.Y.S. (Save Your Soap):

Take any kind of bottle, and put a little bit of dish soap in a bottle, and fill the rest up with water. It saves soap, and it looks pretty too.

You can probably dilute a lot of other household chemicals, as well. Leave me a comment, and share your bright ideas!