Since every product profiled below is a powder, I have to reiterate this tip about powders: Liquefy your powder before adding it to the carbonated water by stirring it into 40 to 50 milliliters of water. For example, if you are using a one-liter bottle, then you would need to mix two packets with that small amount of water. You can use the cap from a SodaStream syrup bottle, or an old prescription vial or bottle, to mix the powder and water in prior to adding it to the carbonated water.
Last month, while searching for flavors that I could possibly make sodas from, I went on Amazon, and I came across this variety pack of fruit-flavored drink mix packets from Frutal, a Mexican manufacturer. Since their flavors were so different from those that I had already tried, I thought I'd give their flavors a try.
Frutal Citrus Punch: I really like this flavor--the smell and taste remind me favorably of Orange Pineapple Tang.* I will enjoy it with plain cold water. But do not mix this into carbonated water--even after liquefying it, once I added it to the carbonated water, it fizzed like crazy--yes, much worse than Strawberry Sunkist did--and it spilled all over the place.
*Orange Pineapple Tang helped me through some nasty flus and colds in the 2000s, so it became part of my cold/flu starter kit (alongside DayQuil and NyQuil), but a few years ago, Kraft/Heinz stopped making that flavor of Tang. Now, in Frutal Citrus Punch, I've found a drink mix that tastes like Orange Pineapple Tang. As long as I remember to take some vitamin C with it, I should be fine next time I get a cold or the flu.
Frutal Summer Colada: I like this piña colada flavor as well, and I'd mix that with some nice cold water as well. But with carbonated water, there was a big mess. So, I'll put off testing the other two Frutal flavors (Tropical Berries, Tangy Limeade) with carbonated water, pending a comparison of the list of ingredients in their flavors vs. the ingredients in mixes that don't come anywhere near making such a mess.
Instead, I decided to try two of the other drink mixes made by Juicy Mixes, LLC:
Canada Dry: Awesome! Another home run by Juicy Mixes LLC! And yes, I prefer this over the SodaStream version. As I said a week ago regarding the A&W drink mix, why settle for the store brand if the national brand is available--and cheaper, too! (No, seriously. Consider this: SodaStream's generic syrups, like Dr Pete, ginger ale and orange, generally go for $6 these days, and each bottle of syrup makes about 9 liters. That's 67 cents a liter. Now, those little 6-packet boxes of Canada Dry, 7-Up, and Sunkist, I found those for $1 at Dollar General. 6 packets make three liters, so that comes out to 33 cents a liter.)
7-Up: I prefer this over the SodaStream Starry syrup. It's not as sweet as Starry was. But those two sodas have me thinking about what it is that I want from a lemon-lime soda to begin with. When I was younger, meaning from the 1980s to around 2015, I preferred to rotate between soda flavors--cola, lemon-lime, orange, root beer, Dr Pepper, and a few Faygo flavors (e.g., Rock & Rye, Redpop, Cream Soda). At that time, I preferred 7-Up over Sprite and Slice, but I couldn't articulate my reasoning any better than "I just like the taste of 7-Up better". When I dropped regular sodas in 2010, I found I liked Sprite Zero, but I couldn't figure out why beyond "I like the taste of that better than Diet 7-Up or Diet Sierra Mist." Bottom line, I prefer that my lemon-lime soda taste crisp rather than sweet. Both times, I was drinking lemon-lime sodas for the sake of variety. More recently, however, I don't drink that kind of soda as often. I lean more towards flavored colas, Dr Pepper, root beer, and any limited edition zero-sugar sodas that come out
Next time: Now that I have Orange Crush, Pineapple Crush, Orange Sunkist and Pineapple Sunkist, I will try to see which drink mix pairing can best replace Faygo's Pineapple Orange flavor. Pineapple Orange was one of the Faygo flavors I enjoyed prior to switching to zero sugar sodas 14 years ago, especially because it is a flavor that (as far as I know) no one else makes. (Yes, Fanta and Sunkist make pineapple sodas and orange sodas, so I could mix those together, but try finding zero sugar versions of pineapple sodas at your local supermarket.)
No comments:
Post a Comment