welcome friends welcome back to the kitchen the temperature is warming up
outside so I thought I'd start back into making some of the pop recipes and one
of the ones that I want to try is for a cherry pop there are a couple that I
really like there's one from the Carolinas called Cheerwine I think that
one is great there was one here from the pop shop that was a black cherry that
was absolutely amazing when I was a little kid sometimes I think that the
cherry pops are a little bit too OneNote and so I'm trying to come up with
something that gives a little bit more of a depth of flavor something that is
not just one note so I've started out in this bottle with some cherry bark the
cherry bark is going to give us cherry flavor but it's also going to give us
just a little bit of bitterness and complexity to that I'm gonna add some
glycerin and glycerin is a very thick liquid and it's going to help keep the
cherry flavor on your tongue longer and then to this I'm also going to add some
water put a lid on and give it a shake and so I'm just gonna leave this on the
counter for 24 hours before we come back to do the next step okay 24 hours have
gone by and the liquid has taken on quite a bit of color a nice dark rich
color and it's got this you can tell that it's cherry just definitely a
cherry note in there but it's got this sort of deep rich dark it's difficult to
describe but I'm hoping that this is going to bring sort of something in the
bottom to cut the sweet notes of the cherry so I want to filter out the
liquid from the bark and one of the problems with making Pop at home that
I've found through all of my experiments is that you really need to filter it
well because anywhere that there's a tiny little particle floating in the
liquid it's called a nucleation site and it helps to drive out the carbon dioxide
so it doesn't stay carbonated as long and I really want to kind of get around
that by filtering it well you can see it's gonna filter very
slowly and so here I have some hot water that I've just boiled it's cooled down a
little bit because I've measured it out and I'm gonna swirl it around get the
rest of the bark and then pour it into the filter just to get the last of
everything out of that bark okay well that continues to filter egg I have a
bag of dark sweet frozen cherries they've been pitted it was the easiest
way for me to get berries at this time of the year and so we put those into
this blender there's some really good cherry stuff in the bags so I'm gonna
pour some water into the bag I'm going to get as much cherry juice as I
possibly can and then I'm going to pour that water
into the blender and put this on to liquify okay now I've got a fine mesh
strainer which isn't gonna be fine enough but I'm gonna start there and get
the biggest bits out and then move to progressively finer and finer until I
put it through a coffee filter I want to get most of the big bits out again to
stop nucleation sites so pour this through and see what happens most of its
going to go right through so that is going to take a very long time to settle
out and in the interest of trying different things and experimentation
I've also got a juicer and I've got another bag of cherries so I'm gonna put
these frozen cherries through the juicer and see what happens there
the next step is to combine most of the ingredients so here I have the liquid
from the bark and I'm going to put that into this pot these two things are
cherry juice now in both cases it took a very long time to filter them to get rid
of most of the particulate matter and I think I've done that and that that is a
very important step now they first went through a mesh
strainer then a mesh strainer with some cheesecloth then this micro filter
coffee filter and then the micro filter coffee filter with this Chemex paper
filter and that filtered everything out but it really cut down on the amount of
juice that I got let's give each one to taste and see what happened okay first
up this is the one from the blender and it's already watered down pretty good
cherry flavor yeah pretty good cherry flavor now this one not watered down
thing is even though this isn't watered down eventually I am gonna have to water
it down in order to dissolve the sugar in it so this probably isn't the
greatest test but let's just see yeah obviously more concentrated I'm not
going to use this one right away I'm going to use this one because it already
has the water in it so I'm going to put this into the pot and we're going to
turn this on to kind of a medium-low heat next in is the sugar and this is
cane sugar now I know that a lot of people are going to argue with me on
this it is cane sugar there's the bag here's the deal despite what you think
you've learned from the internet and mommy bloggers and health food bloggers
white sugar candy cane sugar and all of those soda pop manufacturers that put on
their bottle that they use pure cane sugar they're going to be using this
ultra pure cane sugar because it's the only way in an industrial setting to get
consistency of flavor they're not going to be using a brown sugar or sugar in
the raw because those vary in flavor batched batch
these companies thrive on consistency this is the sugar that they would be
using in fact they would get it as a liquid probably already dissolved in
water so it would come as a syrup so I don't want to bring this up to a boil
I just want to heat it enough that we can dissolve that sugar in and it's no
longer gritty looks like the sugar is dissolved so I'm going to put it into
this jug so I can let it cool down and I'm gonna give it a taste and this is
where I want to adjust the flavor a little bit something that I've been
avoiding using is cherry extract my hope was that I could get enough cherry
flavor from the cherries that I wouldn't have to resort to an extract and there's
nothing wrong with an extract I mean I could have started right from the top
with this extract it's all natural it's just the essence of cherries taken out
in an alcohol solution but let's give it a try
see what's what's going on here that's nice got the cherries the glycerin that
I used with the that the tree bark has given it a really nice consistency to
hold the flavor in your mouth a little bit longer
the tree bark is adding a little bit of astringency to counteract with the with
the sweetness and the sugar and that's going to work with the acid that we're
gonna put in next but I still think I'm gonna put maybe half a tablespoon of
this extract in give it a stir and then see what happens yeah that takes it over
the top now this isn't too hot but I want to
cool it down before we move on to the next step
now as a test I'm going to carbonate a little bit in an ISI whipper and I'm
going to use carbon dioxide not nitrous oxide which is what you would use for
whipped cream so a small amount of the concentrate and then some water next in
is one of these two compounds so phosphoric acid is what's in most
soda pops sold today in North America Canada in the United States now
phosphoric acid is pretty dangerous in this sort of high concentration I got
this from Kitchen alchemy I would only buy it from a company like kitchen
alchemy that makes food-grade phosphoric acid don't go on Amazon and buy
phosphoric acid from you know some guy who uses it for cleaning swimming pools
the other option is something called acid phosphate and acid phosphate is
phosphoric acid that's sort of cut down a little bit makes it less volatile you
can get it from this company called extinct chemical company and it is
something that was used in the 1800's at the soda bars we know where the soda
jerks were in the pharmacies does essentially the same thing it's easier
to work with there's less opportunity for you to hurt yourself so I'm going to
start with that I'm still playing with this to figure it out and we need about
a teaspoon of it so get a bit of teaspoon and put that in put on the lid
take the co2 cannister and give it a charge now I'm gonna give it to charges
so take that canister out and do a second one then I'm going to put this in
the fridge and I'm gonna let it chill completely the colder you can get it the
more co2 that will be absorbed into the liquid
and the better carbonation we'll get on the pop
hey Jules this is this how's your multi day beverage project going on so this is
like day four of making this so this is a cherry pop using acid phosphate as the
acid okay now the cherry color of course all
cherry pops that you buy in the grocery store or the corner shop have food
coloring and the red dye number whatever 40 maybe so the color isn't right until
you put the red dye in it smells cherry
needs more cherry it is light on the chair it is light on the cherry okay so
but it's nice cherry it's just a little light the carbonation is good
I think the acid is almost right so yeah it doesn't have a it's not super sharp
it's okay so I'm gonna add a little bit more of the cherry concentrate and I'm
gonna make another one and we'll be right back in a couple seconds any time
is fast okay so I upped the amount of cherry essence but I used the same acid
okay so this is the same same but just an increase in the cherry for flavor
okay and I didn't add any food coloring to make it redder so it's still this
kind of pink rosy and it is over carbonated I could probably get away
with just one of the of the carbonator things so are a lot of bubbles so no
matter how carefully I'm gonna pour this it's it's gonna be carbonated there you
go I'll try that shake on your floor there
goes it right I don't want to get nervous I don't report to quickly thank
you it's not helping the commenters are savage okay more cherry on the nose
it's funny cuz it only has a little bit like it okay yeah was definitely more
cherry smell but I don't know that it has a huge difference in the flavor I
mean it's a little bit more it's gonna take a lot more cherry concentrate a lot
more cherry concentrate I think it depends what you're looking for though
like I really like this I've been like the last one I like just the light
flavor of fruit in it yeah but it is not the sickly sweet cherry pop soda
whatever you want to call it it's not yeah that was well you know my
childhoods the pop shop black cherry yeah was something and I'm not that
super sweet version that I'm used to is and this is this one Cheerwine this is
this is over-the-top super sweet cherry yeah I like it I like it a lot but when
you read the you know what's in here it's carbonated water sugar caramel
color phosphoric acid natural and artificial flavors artificial cherry
flavor and red number forty to make it the color okay so I still have more
cherry juice from the other extraction process I'm gonna come back at this
again I figured out how to use the phosphoric acid with without burning our
mouths out ah thank you so I'm gonna try to try out the phosphoric acid so I'm
gonna give this another go I'm gonna see if I can up the cherry how much you need
to up the cherry but you know you are it is kind of a refreshing I really like it
out on the back porch I drink it just like this you're looking for this you
guys not Jess yeah this is good thanks for stopping by see you again soon
you