It's really tough seeing the amount of sugar that this recipe has. Really puts things into perspective, compared to simply drinking the end product from a can.
Acid-sugar taste-hacking is something that has bothered me for quite a while.
We know that sodium consumption can be drastically reduced by adding salt at table rather than adding it directly to food. Why doesn't this happen with sugar? Why not make desserts that take advantage of the fact that surface sugar will make it seem to be sweeter than it actually is and just have table sugar?
First of all, surface salt doesn't taste nearly as good as food that is salted throughout. Every chef knows this. Not to mention that salting foods before cooking changes their texture as well. This is why a steak that is salted an hour before grilling is far more flavorful and has a better texture than one cooked without salt, but salted at the table. And it's not a subtle difference, either -- we're talking night-and-day.
And dessert basically goes the same way -- I honestly can't even imagine what something like a cherry pie would be if it were cooked without sugar, and then you were expected to dump sugar on top. But it would not be good.
That might be true, but it takes toooo much salt. So I prefer to salt after cooking, right before eating because it requires way less and gives roughly the same effect.
The reason a chef "knows this" is because if you judged their food with or without salt, the salt one would win, so in the end they're required to add waaay to much salt, when the tongue just needs those surface crystals.
Healthier to salt after, and therefore cook your own food.
It does not, and that can (and has been!) be empirically shown. Salt gets into the food and changes both chemical properties and how it responds to cooking. Pre-seasoned meats, for example, are more tender.
If you prefer to salt at the table, by all means, eat your food however you like it, but it is simply false to claim that there's no difference or "chefs just add too much salt".
It's not. Unless you have hypertension or some other medical condition around salt, there's no reason to restrict your salt intake.
For the average person, the level of salt in restaurant food has no unhealthy effects whatsoever. Amounts in excess of your daily requirement are simply excreted in urine.
You can make fine powdered sugar at home with a coffee-grinder, but it will absorb moisture over time so the industrially-made variety has additives to prevent that.
I actually do this instead of buying powdered sugar. I make my own brown sugar instead of buying it as well. Both are very easy to do, so I just make it on an as-needed basis. That way, I don't have to worry about storage and the considerations that come with it.
After drinking Coke for about 32 years, I switched to Coke Zero (I have cystic fibrosis and scarring of the pancreas eventually leads to diabetes). After 14 years, drinking a regular Coke tastes like I'm drinking maple syrup.
I'm aware that aspartame isn't ideal, but I'm not brave enough to give up sweet-tasting beverages yet. :-)
Luckily for me I only drink the small 7.5oz cans... so I only ingest 6 cubes of sugar... oof. Still an improvement over my younger years. I don't have many 'addictions' in my life, but this vice has been with me for a long long time.
I went from consuming nearly no sugar to consuming really quite a lot when I started cycling seriously. Compromise I'm at now is to do sugars for the purposes of energy for workouts, high quality calories everywhere else.
When I was younger and drank more soda, I discovered I could grab a can of coke, pour it into a 24oz cup I had, then fill the can with water and pour that in and it tasted the same to me. If I focused on the flavor it was very subtly different, in a way that felt more refreshing -- but most of the time I was just drinking it without full focus and couldn't tell the difference.
Back then I was also packing lunches for my wife, and she wanted a bottle of commercial fruit juice to have with lunch. We'd buy a large bottle to save money and pour some into a smaller bottle for transport. I mentioned my experiment and she said "I'd like it if you had me try it with the juice" -- so I started doing it. A few days later she brought it up again, "Can we start diluting my juice I'm taking in?" and I told her she'd already been having diluted juice.
These days I fall into "water is the real adult beverage" but I always keep in mind just how sweet things are commonly made.
To my taste buds, North American candy, soda, and other sugary snacks have gotten twice to three times sweeter since I was a kid. To the point that in most cases, all you can actually taste is the sugar and nothing else. It would be interesting if someone were able to dig up a 30-year-old can of Coke or whatever and compare its carbohydrate content to modern Coke. (You can't just use the Nutrition Facts label, because that is not only a recent invention, but also companies free use it to lie about their products.)
We have a 1st-gen Coke freestyle machine in my workplace. On the rare occasion I go for it, I pick a zero-sugar variant, and I dilute it with 50% sparkling water otherwise every single flavor is way, WAY too sweet for me.
That's exactly what I wanted to say. Both Cola and Pepsi are too damn sweet. On the rare occasion at the right temperature and amount of thirst on my side I can drink a 330ml bottle and actually enjoy the taste. But most of the times it feels like too sugary so either I drink just a small glass and lots of water afterwards or just mix it with carbonated water directly. Bottom line: usually feels too sweet for me.
Like coffee: I like a hint of sweet in my espresso, but Cola is like dumping 4-5 spoons in a small cup of coffee. Becomes sugar syrup and that's all one can taste anymore.
I know it should be a warning sign to just not drink coke, but I've instead taken it as a "this is literally for filling a glass already prefilled to the brim with ice like in the ads" kind of thing.
Because undiluted coca cola is just honestly not very good, and extremely uh, I'm not sure how to put it, practically pungent
> have gotten twice to three times sweeter since I was a kid.
They definitely have not. You just like sugary things better as a kid.
It's kind of like, the summer camp I went to as a kid, and recently revisited as an adult -- they shrunk all the buildings and fields in size by half! Or so it certainly seemed, I could have sworn...
I can't eat the candy I ate as a kid either. Now, 85% dark chocolate on the other hand...
That's the recipe for the syrup [0], not the final beverage. The final beverage would obviously be diluted, to the given ratio of 7:1 in favor of carbonated water.
The water/sugar ratio for the OpenCola syrup is nearly 1:1, which is the same ratio as simple syrup [1].
I'm gonna poke at this only because some people take the anti-sugar message too far and use it to rationalize away the stuff that's really killing them.
Refined sugar is certainly not good for you, but a 12oz can of Coke - is 140 calories. That's about 6% of the recommended daily caloric intake.
Calories RDI is about 2000-2500 for most people. But most Americans eat more like 3000-3500 and don't exercise.
You can drink a 12 oz can of Coke every day and it's not even a blip on the radar. (A 64 oz tub of it, of course, is a different story.) What people need to do to be healthy is not overeat by 1,000 calories a day while never exercising. That combo will send you to an early grave, the can of Coke in a diet that otherwise hits the right macros, will not.
Yes, I would indeed expect that drinking around 700 fewer calories per day would lead to weight loss, because once again, despite endless protestations against the principle, calories in, calories out is the largest predictor of weight gain or loss. It's great to hear!
RDI for added sugar itself is 24-36 grams which a single 12oz can of Coke exceeds. Measuring in Calories, it's recommended to limit daily intake from added sugar to below 100-150 Calorie. [0]
% of Caloric RDI isn't the whole story. A can of Coke is less of a blip on the radar as you suggested.
I had the same reaction. Makes one realize how cooking for yourself can greatly impact calorie intake. If I made my own soda instead of grabbing one from a machine I'd certainly balk at the amount of sugar I see, but the number on the side of the can tells me the same info but with less psychological impact.
I stopped drinking soda many years ago because it's all just far, far too sweet for me. But a couple of years back, I started making my own (real) root beer because making my own means that I can control how sweet it is. I prefer mine with about 1/3 the sugar that is in most soda.
This is true, but the thing is, you don't have to follow the recipe. When I made a batch of this, I just bought the 7x concentrate from Cuba-Cola (https://cube-cola.org/index.php?route=product/category&path=...) and then added like half the amount of sugar it called for when making the concentrate, so that it was more like a 1:1 sugar:water ratio ("simple syrup") rather than a 2:1 ("rich syrup"). It didn't taste as sweet as commercial Coke, but it tasted fine.
https://www.zmescience.com/other/sugar-26072011/