if you completely dehydrate soda.
Does it become a syrup?
Can we get it to being a hard powder?
Can we then mix it back into some carbonated water
and make soda once again?
[Captions by Y Translator]
Previously, we've done an experiment where we boiled soda
until all of the water in it was gone.
And that was pretty cool.
But it had one thing in it that I didn't really like.
And that's the heat of the stove.
It was so concentrated that it began burning
the non-water ingredients after all of the water had boiled off.
I wanted to see what would happen if you just pulled the water out
but kept the temperature low enough,
that it wasn't going to burn anything else.
Sugar melts at approximately 320°F
and a lot of chemical changes start happening when that goes on.
So instead of that, we're going to be using
the Dehydro-Tron 5000.
Pouring some soda into some trays and seeing what we get
if we just dehydrate all of the water out.
It might take a few days, but we'll just keep it running.
The idea here is really simple.
We'll pour out the soda into a couple of trays,
stick them in the dehydrator until it doesn't seem
to be doing anything anymore.
And then see what it looks like.
To start off, we've got two of these cheap aluminum trays.
They don't quite fit into our dehydrator.
We're going to cut the walls down a little bit short.
It does fit in terms of the other dimensions.
It's just that each trays a little too tall.
So let's shorten those.
Please note.
If you do this with any nice scissors,
it will probably ruin them.
These came in a pack of five for $5.
So, I'm not too worried about it.
There we go.
We've got our two trays.
I think I'm going to put them in the dehydrator
and then just pull them out a little bit
before I pour the soda in so I'm not like,
lifting a tray full of splashy liquid everywhere.
Let's get this set up.
If you've watched our other videos,
you may remember the Dehydro-Tron 5000.
This is a cardboard box lined with foil.
We have a 250 watt heat lamp
and a small computer fan right here.
Once both of those are on at the same time,
we get about 150°F
and a lot of good circulation.
With the holes in the top,
and the door closed,
all the air flows in, up and out the top.
It does a really good job of drying things out.
And we need to dry these out a lot.
The tray is fitting nicely in there.
Start with the cola.
These are 20 ounces.
It's 591 milliliters.
Okay it's looking pretty full.
It's not quite even because our table isn't quite level.
But that's all right.
Fan is plugged in and it's blowing in of course if I turn on the light,
I have adjustable control over the brightness
to some degree that also controls the temperature as well.
I don't think I'll go for maximum heat.
Lot of bubbling going on.
Turn it off for just a second.
As we close the door here,
carefully because we don't want to spill all over.
Now of course we just need to let this run
and I'm not actually going to leave it out here.
I'm very carefully going to move everything
to an indoor location.
So it's not just exposed to the elements.
But we're just going to let this run.
That's it.
Its gonna dehydrate and that takes time.
We need to slowly evaporate all of the water out.
We'll try and check in at about the 12 hour mark.
And after that, we'll probably just see how long it takes
for it to completely dehydrate.
Update time.
We've actually let this run a little bit more than 12 hours.
It's run for about 14.
Let's check out what has happened to our sodas in our dehydrator.
Okay.
Wow.
So there is
clearly a lot less mass here.
That is definitely not 20 ounces.
Definitely not our 591 milliliters.
That is wow.
You can see how thick that is.
It's running like a syrup.
See if our cola is the same.
I think that's a little runnier, but it's still definitely
thicker than soda.
Not much running or just a little bit.
Of course I have to taste these.
Orange soda syrup.
Well it tastes like orange soda.
Oh man.
It doesn't taste quite the way I think I imagined it would.
Obviously it's very sweet because there's a lot
of sugar still in there without a lot of water.
But the other flavors when they become concentrated like this,
they don't really seem to scale
the same way that the sugar does.
It's actually, there's a fair amount of bitter flavoring to it.
This brand of orange soda does actually have caffeine in it
and I know that caffeine is a flavoring used in lots of types of sodas.
And maybe that's part of what I'm tasting.
It is sort of a bitter flavoring.
The orange definitely comes through the most.
But there are other flavors in there.
It's not terribly different from orange cough syrup.
So.
Let's try the cola.
Definitely a thinner syrup.
I'm not sure why.
Oh man.
The diluted Coke is really really strong.
Very cola flavor, very strong sugar flavor.
And it also has some of the bitter flavor.
What I think we need to do now is take our syrup trays,
put them back in the dehydrator and just keep letting it run.
I'm really hoping that this can dehydrate all the way out
to the point where we don't even have a liquid.
Where it's something that's dry and maybe crackly
and maybe even can be broken up into a powder.
But that may or may not happen.
I haven't tried this before.
Let's find out.
We have now left our soda dehydrating for a long time.
These trays were in the dehydrator,
for about a week solid dehydrating.
That's quite a bit.
And it didn't take very long for most of the moisture to disappear.
And I was just seeing if it would go even farther,
I was trying to see if we could get like a powder
or something crystallize.
And it doesn't seem that that happens.
There's enough other ingredients other than water that what we end up
with is this thick sticky syrup.
This 20-ounce bottle was entirely emptied into this tray.
And this is all we have left.
Almost everything has gone.
So by far the largest part of this was water.
The second ingredient in both of these bottles
of soda was high fructose corn syrup
and I'm guessing that's what's causing it to be a thick syrup
rather than just a powder.
The high fructose corn syrup clearly doesn't dehydrate
all the way down to being dry.
So now what we want to do is gather up all of the syrup
from one of these and put it into a cup
and see just how much of it we have left.
Now this is thick enough that I might have a hard time
getting all of it off the bottom of the pan
but I'm going to do what I can.
Random fact.
The term soda is from the word sodium
which was a common mineral in natural springs water.
The word pop was first used in 1812 and referred to the sound
of a carbonated beverage opening.
Almost all of the syrup.
There's a little bit stuck in the pan that I couldn't get out.
And I would say we have just under 1/4 cup.
But now the question I think,
is whether or not we can put this back
into the soda bottle and add water.
Well we don't necessarily need to mix it up in the bottle.
But we do want to see if we can reconstitute this into soda.
Well I'm going to start just by filling this bottle
with about 20 ounces of water.
I'll try and leave out about that much.
And then I'm going to pour that into a pitcher
because it's easier to stir in
and we're going to scoop and scrape all of this syrup
into the water and see if it will dissolve back in.
We're getting a change in the color of the water.
So at least the color is dissolving in.
There's definitely some mixed in.
There's a lot still in the bottom.
I'm going to switch over
to something with a longer handle.
And it's rigid so I can hopefully scrape
more off of the bottom as it,
it just sinks to the bottom and then it's so sticky.
It sticks even while it's covered in water.
I think that has mostly dissolved back into our carbonated water.
So,
make sense at this point that we have to do,
is test it out.
Let's pour some off into a cup and
see if we've made something drinkable.
Definitely has lost much of the carbonation.
But there's still some bubbles around in there.
Now let's see how it taste.
Hmm.
It has the general taste.
I think there's a little bit too much water.
And probably that's because we've lost some in our pan,
we've lost some in our cup,
we've lost some on our spatula.
And so we probably don't have it as concentrated as it should be.
I don't know it almost seems like it's missing more than that.
And again, also part of that is because it's not carbonated now.
Real quick.
Let's see if we can get the same result
or any sort of result using orange.
When I'm going to concentrate this one even less.
I don't know what is different about them.
But we seem to have less of the orange syrup
than we did of the coke syrup.
I don't know if it just has fewer ingredients
or more evaporated away,
or the base ingredients of flavor for Cola are stronger
and so you need more corn syrup
to offset that.
It's really hard to tell.
I think that is mixed in as well as it's going to mix in.
Color doesn't look quite as vibrant in my opinion
as it did when it was new
but we'll see maybe even though I only filled that bottle halfway,
it's still somehow not concentrated enough.
That would be interesting.
Maybe the color dye doesn't like to be dehydrated.
Cheers.
Oooh.
That actually maybe too concentrated.
That's strong.
Reconstituting dehydrated soda.
Does it work?
Not really.
I give that like a C- at very best.
Once you've made the syrup,
it doesn't really mix in very well.
It takes a lot of time and effort to get it to mix
and the process de-carbonates
pretty much all of the liquid.
So you end up with something very flat.
And the flavor is very similar but somehow a little bit
different than the original.
So while I'd say it's very interesting to see
what happens when you remove all of the water from soda,
that thick, gloopy, severely colored syrup
is pretty interesting stuff.
But I would not say that it's a practical application
and I wouldn't suggest you try and make dehydrated soda syrup
that you can later mix back in.
I do think it's really cool to see what's
in a bottle of soda other than water.
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