Hey guys, I'm Nate welcome back to the workshop not too long ago
We showed you how to use liquid nitrogen to turn soda into a delicious Slurpee at the end of that video
I said I might want to try it again
Using dry ice because the liquid nitrogen pulled all of the carbonation out of our soda
And I was curious if dry ice would put carbonation back into the soda as it froze it well today
We're gonna try a few different varieties of that. We'll see if we can get a Slurpee. That's still nice and fizzy
We've got our soda. We've got our dry ice let's get started
To start let's pour a measure of our soda into our Bowl
Then break up some
Medium sized chunks of our dry ice put that in and stir it and see if we can get our soda to start freezing
That's about the size
About the size I want get these chunks in there
just kind of stir it up and see if we can get it to start freezing into a slush
I don't really have a good sense for how long this should take I've never tried just
Chunks of dry ice and soda before to see how long it takes to solidify
We're getting somewhere getting some slush in there. That's what you want to see
Interesting how it's sort of freezing with a pebbled texture to it
It's not going evenly everywhere
And I'm not sure what's causing the difference turning into a good slushy though, the question is whether enough of the carbon dioxide
Coming off of the dry ice has been dissolved into the slushy as it's mixing up and freezing to really give us a carbonated
Fizzy result when we eat this
Alright, I think that's a pretty good freeze on here try and scoop it from the bowl into our cup and of course we want
To avoid scooping any chunks of dry ice into our cup. We don't want to eat those
Just want them to cool everything down and add a little bit of carbonation, hopefully
There we go a homemade Slurpee it took five or six minutes of stirring up I would say and overall it works pretty
Well, it's a good texture, tastes really good
It's not very fizzy there might be a little bit, but there are a couple other things
I still want to try to see if they give us a little bit more fizz. For our next test
We're gonna take a similar
Quantity of dry ice but then we're gonna throw it in a blender and turn it into a very fine powder
We'll see what happens if we mix that powder in with our soda and see if we get a different texture a different freeze time
And if it's more or less carbonated than our first one
Our blender actually seals up airtight when it's closed so to keep the CO2 pressure from building up inside
We're gonna drill a small hole into the side of the cup
Alright, let's take our soda. Dump in our blended up CO2
It's not a complete powder
But there is a lot of powder in there
Wow that is definitely freezing way way faster
In fact it's frozen pretty much all of the way already
with a bunch of CO2
left over in it
And then of course we don't want to eat the dry ice which is one of the concerns
I had with this method is that we're putting
Powdered dry ice into the soda if the soda contains a little bits of dry ice that haven't turned back into gas
Then the dry ice would just go in your mouth if you started to eat it. We don't want to do that
wow that froze it so
so much faster, like I said it took five or six minutes with the chunks of dry ice just
constantly stirring with the powdered stuff it just
immediately almost started freezing together a lot more surface area
Alright here. We go. We've got our considerably more frozen slushy at this point
I think we've maybe even gone past the texture of slushy and
Into, I don't know it's kind of like the fruit flavored dippin dots almost it's not quite that frozen
And it's not that well defined you can't see the individual particles that much, but it is almost
Powdery it's so frozen. Alright I've got a spoonful of this
I'm trying to make sure there's no vapor rising off of it because I don't want any dry ice chunks in my mouth
Freezing onto my tongue that sounds uncomfortable
Let's try this
Still surprisingly little in terms of fizz. I don't know I think maybe
Carbon dioxide doesn't dissolved well into liquid when it's this cold once it starts freezing
They might squeeze all of the carbon dioxide out of it and just not hold any fizz left
Well there is another variety we want to try
We've still got some dry ice and as we've seen in the past if we freeze our dry ice in liquid nitrogen it becomes
Extremely brittle to the point where we can just sort of break it apart
So I'm going to try taking some dry ice freezing it in liquid nitrogen
Then breaking it apart into a dust and then using that to freeze our soda. Let's give it a shot
All right, we've got some liquid nitrogen in our bowl
Let's add a chunk of dry ice to it and let it really get cold in case dry ice isn't cold enough
Ha! it just falls right to pieces now, all right, let's see how soft this stuff is
Man, that does come apart really easily
In comparison normal dry ice
Nothing
super frozen dry ice
Still hurt a little bit, but it broke up
Not even gonna blend this I'm just gonna put the lid on and then shake it up
That powdered most of it. We've got our little jet of carbon dioxide gas flying out here in the hole
Alright, let's pour off some soda, and then add our powdered carbon dioxide to it
Well I would say an even faster freeze time than the normal powdered dry ice. That goes so quickly
It's still so cold, I'm just gonna pour more soda on top of it
React with the rest of the dry ice in there
Compared to just a bottle of soda this seems like it has so much volume
It's got so much air and carbon dioxide added into it
It just seemed a lot bigger. I kind of wonder how much this could keep freezing
We got a whole bottle of soda, and it's you know it froze all of it no problem
I think we're gonna add more from a different bottle and see if we can get it to freeze some of that, too
More. I'm gonna keep going until it doesn't freeze it anymore or until I run out of bottles of soda
It's so weird
This is the same amount of dry ice for the most part as what went into our first batch with the larger chunks of dry ice
and it took a while to freeze just that much soda that was about half of one of these bottles and
In the end it still wasn't nearly as frozen as this is so
Grinding it up and changing the surface area makes a huge difference. Just got a little bit left in this bottle
Let's just top this off
There we go that's our orange and lime or sorry Mandarin and lime flavored
Sodas mixed together, and there is still chunks of dry ice in there. You can see the vapors that are still forming
I dig down I can pull a couple of them out
Take a gamble here. I don't think there's much dry ice in this bit
Mandarin line
That might have actually had a little bit of fizz to it
There you go making slushies using soda and dry ice. We tried a few different varieties
And we learned a few things - dry ice can freeze soda into a slushy consistency
If you use the large chunks, it may take a few minutes of stirring but you'll get there. You'll get a nice mixed-up, slushy consistency
Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to have much in the way of carbonation in fact none of our experiments really gave us a carbonated slushy for
The most part so something about soda seems to not really absorb the carbon dioxide once
It's gotten down to the temperature
Where it's cold enough to actually begin to freeze
We tried taking your dry ice and blending it up into a powder to see what difference that made when we mix it into our
Soda and it froze way faster. It went from five or six minutes of stirring to about 10 seconds of stirring
It was already frozen, but we also still had little chunks of dry ice sort of mixed in with our frozen soda
And we don't want to be putting the chunks of dry ice in our mouth
So you have to be really careful sort of picking around the dry ice as you scoop it out into your cup
Then finally we tried freezing our dry ice even more in liquid nitrogen to really bring the temperature down
Because that also makes it more fragile
So we took our super cool dry ice broke that down into tiny little chunks and powder and mixed that in with the soda.
That did an amazing job of freezing the soda, very quickly as well. In fact
We're able to freeze two entire bottles full of our soda
And it still turned into slush and had some dry ice left over so overall the dry ice
Definitely has enough freezing power to make a slushy out of a bottle of soda
But it can take a while if you want to do it the safe method which is to leave some larger chunks that can easily
Be picked out once your slushy has formed
Thanks for joining us for this experiment today and remember to come gear yourself up with products and merch at thekingofrandom.com
See you there
Where's my spoon
Oh, that had dry ice in it