Category: Pastry

Could it Happen to You?

Despite repeated boyhood attempts to produce a Simpson-scale explosion by shaking a can of pop until my arm was numb, shaking a can full of carbonated anything does not actually cause an increase in pressure inside the can. What it does is simply create lots and lots of teeny tiny bubbles which, should the container be opened just then, rapidly inflate with escaping CO2. The result is, well…a mess. But without all those bubbles you get no ka-boom, so even the most violently shaken can of soda pop will calm down again after about twenty minutes (with no ill effects to the beverage whatsoever).

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Make Your Own Tonic Water

This recipe comes from The New York Times by way of the ever-resourceful reader Naomi. It’s fascinating stuff…if only I can figure out where to get cinchona tree bark!

4 cups water
1/4 cup (1 ounce/20 grams) cinchona bark, powdered (use a coffee grinder)
1/4 cup citric acid, also known as lemon salt
3 limes, only the peeled zests
3 lemons, only the peeled zests
1 grapefruit, only the peeled zests
1 cup chopped lemongrass (3-4 stalks)
9 whole allspice berries
6 whole cardamom pods
1/4 teaspoon kosher salt
1 tablespoon lavender
3-4 cups rich simple syrup (by volume, two parts sugar to one of boiling water, stirred to dissolve)

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A Short History of the Soda Fountain

Healthful spring waters were the inspiration for the very first soda fountains. Not every person in the 1800’s could afford a trip to Nimes, Efca or Lake Balaton to treat their various ills. The next best thing, so the entrepreneurs of the day reasoned, was to bring a little of the healing waters to them. And so the bottled water industry was born, the noble intentions of which probably lasted a full five and a half seconds…about as long as it took those same entrepreneurs to realize that nobody living in Peoria would be able to tell Lourdes water from bath water by the time the stuff arrived at the local pharmacy.

So quite a lot of imitation spring and mineral waters began popping up, many of them carbonated. Some of course masqueraded as the real thing, others pretended to be nothing more than they were: man-made, but presumably still possessing the magical healing powers of the genuine article.

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The Other Carbonator

So where else in the world do we find natural carbonation? If you said “inside a beer bong” you get partial credit, frat boy, for beer is indeed naturally carbonated (points will also be given to all those who said “champagne” and “new wines”). Though I suppose I should say it can be naturally carbonated, for most commercial beers, especially lighter lager-type beers, are artificially carbonated nowadays. It’s what gives them “zing”. So-called “real ales”, many micro-brews, and of course the homemade stuff contains only natural carbonation.

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So Then What’s Mineral Water?

Another nice question. Thanks reader Joanie! Carbonation doesn’t just happen in seltzer bottles or in bottling plants, it happens in nature too. Wherever water and CO2 have the opportunity to mingle, you’ll get both dissolved carbon dioxide and carbonic acid. Most commonly that opportunity comes when underground pockets of volcanically-produced carbon dioxide gas come in contact with underground springs. Provided there’s enough sustained pressure to keep the CO2 from escaping into cracks in the earth, naturally-fizzy water will sometimes bubble up to the surface.

Carbonation can happen in other ways too. If you ever took advanced high school and/or college-level chemistry, you may recall an experiment whereby your instructor dribbled sulfuric acid onto a piece of limestone. The result is a prodigious amount of CO2. Something very similar (if not that very thing) can happen in nature, whereby atmospheric water vapor can come into contact with CO2 to form carbonic acid. When that water falls to earth as weak acid rain, it can enter the water table, come into contact with limestone and bingo: a carbonated spring.

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Blueberry Picking!

The Pastry clan took the early morning off to go pick blueberries, and what condition that orchard was in! Seemed like every time I turned over a few leaves a sight like the one above greeted me. The berries were so thick on the branches that the bushes were literally falling over from the weight:

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What’s the Difference Between Soda and Tonic Water?

Great question, reader Jay. A little something called quinine, an alkaloidal substance found in the bark of the South America cinchona tree. It’s been one of the most popular additions to carbonated water since about the mid-1800’s. How did a bitter-tasting tree extract come to be one of the world’s most sought-after beverage components? In a word: malaria. Quinine was for hundreds of years the most effective anti-malarial drug known to man. It’s been used by Europeans since the early 1600’s, when it was first brought back from the New World, and by native South Americans for goodness-knows-how-many millennia before that.

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H2CO3

So carbon dioxide and water, that’s all there is in soda water is there? Er, well, no not entirely. For you see H2O and CO2 can get together inside a seltzer bottle (or can of pop) to form a little something that goes by the name of of H2CO3, that’s carbonic acid to you and me. Just how much carbonic acid occurs when you carbonate water? Not terribly much, though enough to give soda water and other carbonated beverages their signature sour tang. Oh, you mean you thought the bubbles did it? Nope, it’s the acid. Sorry to burst your uh…oh man, I just can’t bring myself to go there.

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What’s Carbonation?

If there’s one ingredient a soda fountain can’t do without it’s, well…soda. Carbonated water. Fizz. But what exactly is it? Soda is nothing more than carbon dioxide dissolved in water. A gas dissolved in water you say? How does that work? Pretty much the way it sounds. The very first man-made carbonated water was created by a fellow named Joseph Priestly in about 1770. He simply agitated a container of water that he’d suspended over a huge vat of fermenting beer. The atmosphere under that particular section of domed ceiling was nearly 100% carbon dioxide. Eventually enough of the gas dissolved into the water to create bubbles.

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