that's not what I was looking for I'm close I'm very close let me show you
what I did and then we'll discuss what I'm gonna change for the next batch
welcome friends so I've gone down a bit of a rabbit hole lately making pop or
soda and one of the one of the Soda pops that I really loved as a little kid was cream
soda and cream soda where I grew up was sickly sweet you could just barely taste
the vanilla as a component and it was electric pink always electric pink
although in other places it could be clear but here it was always electric
pink and I loved it I loved I loved that it was sweet I love the color and
eventually you kind of grow out of that love because it is too sweet for me now
and it has one sort of mono flavor that eventually I just didn't like anymore so
I went out and I started searching for what other flavors could you add to the
vanilla and could I cut the sugar back and we're other people doing interesting
things with something called cream soda that may not be the cream soda of my
youth but might I might like a little bit better and so I found a company
that's making one that is more of an adult flavor and they're adding coffee
and chocolate or cacao so I thought that's interesting let's see if we can
give it a shot I don't know what proportions to put it all in but we're
just going to play around and we're gonna see what happens
so I'm gonna put in just a few coffee beans and maybe three or four of these
cocoa nibs and I'm just gonna gently crush them in a mortar and pestle so
don't want the chocolate and the coffee to be the dominant flavor I just want to
kind of have it in the background and play with the vanilla so in here
I've got white sugar just regular cane sugar I've got two vanilla pods that
I've scraped the seeds out of I'm gonna put the coffee in the cacao in and the
next thing to address with cream soda is it has that sort of creamy luxurious
mouthfeel and you're not going to get that from regular sugar so I'm gonna do
two things that I've learned from brewing beer and this first thing I'm
gonna put in is lactose and that is milk sugar so if you're lactose intolerant
obviously leave it out you may not need it but I know that it brings sort of a
creamy texture to your mouth even though it has nothing to do with cream there's
no fat it's just the sugar and this is maltodextrin and maltodextrin will also
help with that creamy mouthfeel but it will also help sort of keep the bubbles
bubbling longer I don't know if that makes any sense
so I've got all of that in there next is citric acid and I don't want to put too
much citric acid in because I don't want it to have much of a bite but I do want
to put the citric acid in in order to give it a longer shelf life or keep it
alive in the fridge longer keep it from spoiling so I'm gonna put about a
tablespoon in that's about 15 grams which is less than I used in the other
two pops that we made but both of those were citrus based which could stand up
to more of an acid bite now I've got a liter of water here that's just come to
a boil we're gonna stir this together and dissolve the sugar
so I'm just gonna let this steep and cool down to room temperature before
adding the vanilla extract you don't want to put the vanilla extract in while
it's still hot like this the heat will evaporate the alcohol and you'll lose
some of the flavonoids it's better to wait for this to cool down for the next
step okay so we're all cooled down to room
temperature we're gonna add in vanilla extract I think I'm gonna start with two
tablespoons and we'll see how this plays out so I'm just gonna mix this in okay
so I've got a little sieve and I'm going to strain out the bits of coffee and
cocoa so pour this in okay so I've almost got the flavor there there's a
couple of things working against me one is I'm pretty sure I've got too much
citric acid so I'm gonna dial that back a bit because there's too much tang the
mouthfeel is really good I've got a nice smooth mouthfeel so I know that the
lactose and the malt Oh dextran are doing their job I think though I could
bump up the sweetness a little bit it should be a little bit more sweet but
when I drop the citric acid that sweetness may become more pronounced
with the amount of sugar that I've already got in there so I'm gonna start
out by dropping it the citric acid and I'm gonna take the coffee out I'm just
gonna play with the vanilla and see where that gets me and this is this is
what recipe testing is all about you come up with an idea you test it you
step back you take a look at what you did you take a look at what the outcome
was and you try again and as much as it to fail I don't think it's a failure I
think that it's not what I was looking for but if I didn't do this step I
wouldn't to where I need to be so back to the
drawing board and I'll see you in a future episode where we'll probably get
this right