Folks who are trying to limit their sugar intake have relatively few choices when it comes to sodas. Of course, diet sodas are omnipresent. But what if someone doesn’t like the nasty taste of alternative sweeteners? For all the hype surrounding sucralose and stevia, the fact is that one can definitely taste their presence in a drink.
The obvious solution is to use allulose, because allulose tastes exactly like sugar. But you simply cannot buy a soda that uses only allulose as a sweetener. There are products that use some allulose, but these products always include other alternative sweeteners as well. Stevia is very popular as an allulose adulterant.
The culprit here is really the FDA. The FDA limits the amount of allulose that can be included in any beverage. Why? Well, allulose has one known problem: it draws water into the gut and so, with excessive quantities, can result in … how shall I put this delicately … an explosive incident in the bathroom.
What is the quantity needed to induce this effect? Well, it varies from person to person. But I was told by the FDA that an adult male should have no problem with the quantities that are typically present in a single 8 oz soda. So why do they limit the dosages? Well, because children might consume them. Ok. But I am not a child. So I should be able to create my own allulose soda at home, right? With no ill effects. Presumably. But it’s not exactly easy to find an easy soda recipe online. So I created my own, based on Open Cola’s recipe.
Ingredients
- 3.5 ml sweet orange oil
- 1 ml lemon oil
- 1 ml nutmeg oil
- 1.25 ml cassia oil
- .25 ml coriander oil
- .25 ml neroli oil
- 2.75 ml lime oil
- .25 ml lavender oil
- 10 grams food grade gum arabic
- 3 ml water
- 17.5 ml 75% phosphoric acid (food grade)
- 2.28 liters water
- 3.3 kg allulose
- 1800 mg caffeine1
- 30 ml caramel color
Step 1: Mix the oils and the 3 ml of water in a small bowl. Mix until they are thoroughly combined.
Step 2: Into a blender, mix the allulose, water, phosphoric acid, caffeine, caramel coloring, and the oil mix.
Step 3: After a quick blend, add the gum arabic to the blender. It acts as an emulsifier. The gum arabic MUST be food grade.
Step 4: On the highest setting, blend for two minutes.
Congratulations! You have now made a cola syrup. Store it in an airtight container in the refrigerator. This syrup should be mixed with water in a 1:5 ratio.
When it is time to drink, you have several options. You can mix 1.333 oz of syrup with 5.667 oz of club soda, then simply stir briefly and drink. OR, you can mix 1.333 oz of syrup with 5.667 oz of plain water, stir them together thoroughly, then carbonate with a Drinkmate or Fizzpop or Thirsti drink carbonator. (Sodastream is not ideal for this purpose because it has to be used with plain water, which defeats the purpose; you still have to stir the mixture in after carbonation and this allows some of the carbonation to escape.)
- I’m not sure what the Open Cola Recipe is doing here. They seem to imagine that people have access to pure caffeine powder, so they are giving it to you in teaspoons. Moreover, they give a warning to you about adding too much caffeine, but no way to calculate exactly how much you are really adding. Obviously, caffeine is harmful or fatal in very high doses. But milligrams are the typical measurement for caffeine, not teaspoons. So, to find out how much caffeine I should really add, I had to calculate out about how many final servings this would make. It turns out that this should make roughly 18 liters, which is about 50 12 ounce servings. Since most colas have around 35 mg of caffeine in them, you will need around 1750 mg of caffeine to get the proportion right. I rounded up slightly to 1800 mg, since caffeine capsules typically come in dosages of 100 mg or 200 mg each. ↩︎
