Recipe 23 - Cherry Fresca (Homemade Diet Soda)

Happy New Year!
So, in keeping with your New Year's Resolutions, maybe you've decided to switch to diet.  With homemade, it's easier than you might think.

One of my favorite commercial sodas of all time is Squirt.  Its zesty citrus flavor is hard to beat.  (Maybe you've noticed, but I do love citrus!) Its skinnier doppelganger, Fresca, is not so much my favorite, but mainly because I'm not a big fan of alternative sweeteners.  They just have a bitter flavor to me. And Fresca's image was kind of, well, grandma-ish.

However, a few years ago, Fresca revamped their brand.  They changed their packaging, logo, and added some extra flavors.  Nicely done, Coca-Cola, nicely done.  Their flavor combinations pulled the diet grapefruit out of the "blah".

When I decided to do a diet recipe, Fresca just seemed a nice fit, but I also decided to pull it out of the "blah" with some cherry flavor.  Admittedly, you can do any of my recipes diet, just swap out the sugar with equivalent amounts of sucralose(Splenda) or stevia extract,  or whatever alternative sweetener you prefer.  Avoid heating aspartame (Nutrisweet or Equal) as it turns bitter, but sucralose is alright to heat.  You don't need to, but it does dissolve quicker.

You'll need:
2 cups Splenda
1tsp citric acid (optional, but worth procuring)
1 grapefruit
1 tsp cherry or almond flavoring
1 gallon (4L) carbonated water or club soda

 First, juice your grapefruit.  If you section and score it, it juices easier.

Next, zest your grapefruit.  I've found that you don't have to be as careful with zesting grapefruits as you do with other citrus, it's just as bitter with or without the white pith.

Steep your zest in a cup or two of hot water for about 15-20 minutes.  I like to keep mine covered because I believe it retains more flavor that way, though I have no hard proof of that. Strain to remove the zest and add your sweetener to infused water, then add your grapefruit juice.  Once cooled, add the cherry flavoring (and a few drops red food coloring if you wish, helps people recognize the cherry flavor a bit better).  Top up to 1 gallon with carbonated water and that's it!

Some notes on alternative sweeteners:
I used the sucralose from the grocery store that's intended to be a cup for cup replacement for sugar intended to making converting recipes easier.  This is actually sucralose spray dried onto a maltodextrin carrier, so it's not pure sucralose.  Don't be confused by the fact that pure sucralose is actually many times sweeter than sugar and can't be substituted in the same way.  If you happen to get your hands on some pure sucralose, keep in mind that you will in fact use much less of it (a few grams, if that).

Ace K or Acesulfame Potassium is another that is similar to sucralose.  You may find a source online, but otherwise it's difficult to find.  This is something that's best used with other sweeteners, like a 50/50 blend with sucralose.  As I understand it they have a symbiotic relationship of sorts, so you end up using less for the same effect.

As noted above, aspartame should not be heated.  It will break down and become bitter.  I made that mistake once in making some barbecue sauce with diet coke, not a good plan.  If you buy Equal in the store, it should have a sugar equivalent listed somewhere in terms of teaspoons of sugar.  (48 teaspoons are in a cup).

I have never used stevia extract, so I can't really offer any advice on that one.  I've heard mixed reviews on that one. If you're afraid of anything "artificial", stevia is probably the easiest route for you to take right now other than just cutting out sugar and not trying to make up for the lost sweetness, which in my mind is the most noble, and probably most effective.  You might also look into monk fruit or even miracle berry(syssepalum ducificum) if you don't mind digging for sources.

Recipe 22 - Homemade Holiday Sparkling Cider

Since it's the holidays, I couldn't let them get away without making some tasty holiday soda. 
Basically I made a 5 gallon batch of my friend's Ginger Cider Lemonade with a little adaptation so I didn't have to use so many lemons.
Once that was all mixed up in a keg, I carbonated it at 30psi between 34 and 40°F.  Pretty simple.  It's really good as is and fits almost any occasion.

Cranberry Syrup:
I wanted some variety with some cranberry syrup to be more festive, so I picked up some cranberries in the produce department.  Cranberries are pretty firm, so to draw the juice out of them I heated them up on the stove with some sugar and water:
2 cups cranberries
1/2 cup sugar
1 cup water

As the berries heat up, they'll burst.  This is completely normal.  Mash them up with a potato masher as you go to break up the pulp and skins.  This pulls the color out of the skins, too to give you a nice natural red for your syrup.  Strain the mash, then squeeze it through a cloth jelly bag to remove the larger skin chunks and the seeds from the tasty part of the syrup.

I bottled everything in champagne bottles (or Martinelli's) to be more portable, but also to mix in the different flavors.  To a 24oz bottle I added 1-2oz of syrup and then topped up with the carbonated cider, capped it, and shook it to mix.  1oz gives enough color and flavor that it's noticeable, but not too tart.  2oz really gives a really nice cranberry bite.

I also added some of my pumpkin pie syrup  to some of the bottles for a spiced holiday cider flavor.  It reminded me a bit of a pleasant mix of apple pie and pumpkin pie, but the pumpkin puree detracted a bit from the clean crisp clarity that I expect out of a sparkling cider.

Sodastream Version

I love the ginger cider lemonade recipe, and it is nice to have 5 gallons of a finished sparkling beverage on tap, but I do recognize that many people may not have that luxury.  Many of the home soda makers warn that you should only carbonate water and add the flavor later.  That may not work well for the above recipe, but a frozen juice concentrate would make an excellent base for a sparkling cider.  I took some of my cranberry syrup and added it along with an inexpensive grape juice concentrate to carbonated water for a clone of Welch's Sparkling Cranberry Red Grape.  We love the Welch's Sparkling Blueberry and Red Grape at our house, so a blueberry syrup and grape juice concentrate blend is on deck for the next round of sparkling goodness.

Homemade Soda Holiday Gift Ideas 2012

It's that time of year again.  Halloween is over and Thanksgiving is sneaking up fast.  As of this post, there's only one week until the dreaded Black Friday.  The Holiday shopping season is upon us.
So now you need some gift ideas for that special someone who has taken up a sodamaking hobby.  We can be a hard bunch to shop for, I know.  If you're having some trouble, here are 10 ideas that I have handpicked for anyone who loves homemade soda.

1. The Artisan Soda Workshop by Andrea Lynn

This little book would make a great stocking stuffer.  For anyone who is into natural ingredients and artisan foods, this book is a great companion.  The recipes in it were developed with the Sodastream in mind, so it's a perfect segue from the commercially available sodastream syrups to DIY prowess.  The flavors in here are really inspiring, too.  From Rhubarb Basil and Rosemary Lemonade to Tomato Water and Persimmon-Black Pepper Shrub.  

2.Fee Brothers Sarsaparilla Soda Mix  

Fee Brothers has been serving mixologists since 1920 with drink mixes and flavorings.  They have an impressive lineup of syrups for beverages including Watermelon, Sour Apple, Warm Ginger, Grape, Orange, Lemon, Lime, and many more.  

3. iSi Soda Siphon

iSi has been in the soda siphon and cream whipper business for quite some time.  If you want to go vintage, there are glass syphons with mesh from other manufacturers, but iSi offers a brushed aluminum that will hold up to some wear and is more economical, but still has the vintage feel.  Andrew Schloss recommends these in his book as an easy way for quick force carbonated soda.

4. Overrun Bottle Caps

Bottling in glass bottles is fun.  There's something nostalgic about it.  You can make that experience even more nostalgic with overrun caps.  A plain cap is inexpensive, but lacks character.  This seller on ebay has the best variety of new, unused bottle caps.  You don't have to worry about getting ancient caps that may or may not seal, and you get a great assortment to avoid the mundane.

5. Vintage Soda Crates

If you are bottling in glass bottles, that means that you're storing glass bottles somewhere.  Under the stairs, in the closet, in milk crates, in cardboard boxes.  Vintage soda crates usually run about $25 each depending on where you find them.  This seller on ebay has good feedback and a wide selection.  Check flea markets, craigslist, and antique stores in your area if you want to buy local.  Sometimes garage sales have them for a great price, too.

6. Homebrew Kit

Go old school with a homebrew soda equipment kit from Midwest Supplies.  The process is simple: boil and strain your roots (or easier yet, use an extract), add sugar, pitch the yeast, bottle, and wait.  The process is made easier with a bottling bucket and bottle filler.  

7.Mr. Root Beer or Copernicus Kit.

If you want to go old school, but don't want the big batch kit from Midwest, try an all inclusive kit from Mr. Root Beer or Copernicus.  Kits include everything you need to make a yeast brewed batch of soda.  Pretty much you just add water.  The Mr. Root Beer Kit even includes bottles.

8. Roots and Herbs

Starwest Botanicals is one of the top finds for bulk herbs and spices.  They have a wide selection that includes common root beer and cola ingredients such as sarsaparilla root, sassafras root bark, burdock root, dandelion root, star anise, vanilla beans, and many more.  When using herbs and roots, it's always advisable that these were originally used for medicinal purposes, so it's important to know what these herbs were used for to avoid any unwanted side effects.

9. Fix the Pumps by Darcy O'Neil

From mixologist Darcy O'Neil, author of the Art of Drink blog, Fix the Pumps tells the history of the soda fountain and includes old time formulations using their original ingredients.  A must have history lesson for any soda maker.

10. Gnome Soda Extracts

Gnome specializes in old fashioned flavors and comes highly recommended.  Available in Crystal Clear Vanilla Cream Soda, Dark Vanilla Cream Soda, Draft Style Root Beer, Autumn Red Birch Beer, and Spicy Ginger Beer.  Add your favorite sweetener to taste and carbonate naturally or under pressure.  Their home page has instructions and sugar equivalents, but these must be purchased through other retailers such as CHI, Midwest, Northern Brewer and other homebrew supply stores.

Recipe 21 - Paris Lemon Mint Cooler Soda

This is a recipe that my sister asked me to make up for her wedding.  The idea came from something she had on her trip to Europe.  I think it was basically a sprig of mint leaves and a lemon wedge in ice water, but as I was putting this together for her reception, I thought it would be better sweetened and carbonated.  It worked out very well and I received many compliments on it.  It was such a whirlwind that I personally didn’t get any great pictures of it, but it was a great presentation.  The pictures here are courtesy of their photographer Katie.  The syrup I made was mixed into carafes with club soda.  There was a sprig of mint leaves in some, and raspberries in some others.  The raspberries added a touch of color and some great flavor that mixed in very well with the lemon and the mint. 

I also recently made this and bottled it for a cookout with friends and my kids loved it.  I thought the mint made it more of a sophisticated flavor, but I apparently couldn’t keep this around long enough for many adults to try it.  Imagine that.

1/2 cup Lemon Juice
1/2 tsp Mint Extract
1 lb sugar

This recipe is incredibly simple, but is also incredibly tasty.  Prepare your basic sugar syrup, many longtime readers know I prefer to invert mine.  If you plan on bottling this beverage to store for a while, add the lemon juice when the mixture is still hot to kill off any wild yeasts that might be in the juice.  You don’t want to boil the lemon juice with the sugar, though, or else you will destroy most of the citric acid.  If you’re planning on keeping your final beverage refrigerated or consuming this rather quickly, you can wait for the sugar to cool before adding the juice.  You definitely want to wait for it to cool before adding the mint flavor, the menthol that give mint it’s characteristic flavor boils off quickly, so you’ll end up losing some of the flavor if your sugar is too hot.  (And if you do happen to add it while your sugar is too hot, be sure your face isn’t right over the pot, menthol burns your eyes.)

This is enough syrup for 1 gallon of finished beverage, though the nature of this beverage also lends itself well to more subtle flavors.  So depending on your tastes, you may end up with enough syrup for 1.5-2 gallons finished beverage if you like your flavors and sweetness on this one a little more subdued.

Happy Halloween!

Tony Stark, the Homemade Soda Expert.

Happy Halloween everyone!  I've decided that I would go ahead and break my own unwritten rule of remaining anonymous and faceless here on my blog.  I needed to show off something that I built in a cave with a box of scraps.  Of course by cave, I mean on my living room coffee table, and by box of scraps, I mean a box and some other stuff I had lying around but not necessarily in the box.  But because Trick-or-Treating was postponed in our neighborhood due to weather, I at least needed to awe someone with my glowing chest piece.

I promise I do have a head above my eyes, and I'm not sure how that pumpkin photobombed my picture.  Actually, this was a photo for a contest.  Which is why I'm here today.  Midwest Supplies is hosting their annual Boo Brew giveaway, and who couldn't use some extra supplies to build up their recipe repertoire?  If you like my blog, and you like what I do here, and you would like to see more.  You can do your part to make this blog better by voting for my picture on their Facebook promotion Here.  Voting is open until 11/7.

Thanks for your support!  Now go make some soda!

Recipe 20 - Pumpkin Pie Syrup for Soda and Everything Else

Another write-up for my longtime friends over at Everyday Art
I want to offer a special thank you to them for letting me be a part of their Pumpkinpalooza!



Let me just say that fall is a particularly favorite time of year for me.  October is a good month.  It's time for harvest celebrations, apple cider with glazed donuts, Halloween, and of course all things pumpkin.  Sometimes I wish that everything could taste like pumpkin pie.  Jones Soda did place doubts into my mind with their Pumpkin Pie soda in one of their holiday packs (really Jones, you could have tried harder).  At the first taste of their not so pumpkin pie soda, I knew there had to be a better way.  After many failures in years past to produce a suitable pumpkin pie soda, (it turns out a little pumpkin goes a long way) this is actually a tasty recipe that by far makes all those failures worth the effort.

You'll Need:
1 1/4 cup water
1 cup sugar
1/4 tsp cloves
1/4 tsp ginger
1/2 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp nutmeg
2-3 Tbsp Pumpkin Puree (fresh or from the can)

1. In a small sauce pan, combine the 1 cup of the water and all four spices.
2. Cover and bring to a simmer for about 5 min.
3. Allow to cool, then strain through a fine mesh sieve or suitable strainer to remove the ground spice.  You should have plenty of good spice flavor infused into the water.
4. Top up your spice infused water to 1 cup (I used the remaining 1/4 cup) and combine in the saucepan (rinsed of all spice granules) with the sugar.
5. Heat to dissolve the sugar, this may take it to a simmer again.
6. Remove from heat and add pumpkin puree.
7. Allow to cool and add to soda, oatmeal, pancakes, waffles, french toast, hot chocolate, cream cheese, egg nog, or whatever.

For soda:
To 2 Tbsp syrup, add 8-10 oz of Club Soda or to taste.  Carefully stir and enjoy.  With this recipe, there will be pulp from the pumpkin, so a finished soda doesn't bottle and store well.  I've tried to keep the particulates at a reasonable level by filtering out the spice.  You can leave the spice unfiltered if you wish for using this recipe in things like cream cheese, ice cream, pancakes, hot chocolate, egg nog or anything where you might expect spice to linger.  For a thinner body beverage like soda, it's best to leave the spice granules out, but keep the flavor in.

This is a great Soda Stream recipe because it lends itself well to smaller batches: the pulp settles out if it sits, and if your house is like mine, not everyone likes pumpkin pie flavor, particularly in a soda.  The syrup keeps for up to three weeks in the refrigerator, but it's good enough that it probably won't be around that long.

Recipe 19 - Lemon Water Soda (Homemade Sprite)

When I was a kid, I never believed the Sprite commercials when they said that it was supposed to be a lemon-lime flavor.  They did almost have me fooled into thinking that there was such thing as a "lymon", though.
I always thought that Sprite, 7-up, and other lemon-lime clones were sort of flavorless.  They were sweet, they were clean, they were refreshing, but they weren't distinctly lemon or lime.  Then one day as a child I tasted club soda and it brought everything into context.

Snap to 25 years later, and here's my take on the clear citrus beverage.  Sweetened, carbonated, lemon-water.  I do enjoy a lemon in my water from time to time, and I thought it would be a good match to other green-bottled clear citrus sodas.  It is perhaps the simplest soda next to plain club soda (carbonated water).

You'll Need:

1 Lemon
1 lb sugar
1 tsp Citric Acid , or additional 2 tbsp lemon juice
1 gallon (4 L) carbonated water

The great thing about this is that you can add as much syrup to your carbonated water or as little as you want and it will always taste great (well, within reason).  What I've outlined here is a pretty decent match to the commercial versions, but without the lime.

First, zest the lemon and steep the zest in about 1 cup of water.  You should get a pretty good yellow color, with it, too.  Unfortunately, this doesn't necessarily show up in the finished product.

Next, Strain out your lemon zest/peel, and add your sugar directly to the water that you've used to steep the lemon in.  I normally invert my sugar to get more sweetness out of it, but this comes out nicely without the inversion.  Using pure cane sugar comes out a little clearer, and a little less syrupy, but you do end up with the same amount of calories for less sweetness for those making their own soda for health reasons.  You can obviously always use less sugar for a less sweet drink, also.

To top it off, you'll need to add some tartness.  Again, you can add as much or as little as you'd like depending on your tastes.   For a crisp, clean drink, Citric Acid can be found online or at some health food or specialty food stores.  If you prefer, you can use Lemon or Lime juice, as they are great sources for citric acid, but you will need to add more, and they will add more lemon/lime flavor and some cloudiness.

Add this syrup to your carbonated water and there you have it.  This makes syrup for about 1 gallon of finished beverage depending on how sweet or lemony you want to end up with.