http://www.makesodaandseltzer.com

It’s serving me well and I am making some delicious sodas! And I don’t end up using all that plastic, or even worse, shipping all that water!

It’s also pretty awesome that each regular soda would only have 90 calories, because one of our other health-professional friends made a point a while ago that people who are not diabetic shouldn’t really drink diet drinks on a regular basis, because it will screw up the pancreas’s natural ability to regulate insulin production. The way she explained it was that it initially reads artificial sweeteners as sugar and wants to make insulin, but then realizes that there’s no glucose to counteract, so it stops itself, and if it does that often enough, it stops reacting properly to real sugar. Type 1 diabetics don’t have to worry, though, because their pancreas already quit producing insulin anyway.

(I admit that I then did not do any later checking into this, because I hate the aftertaste of pretty much all artificial sweeteners, and any reason that I “have” to drink regular is fine with me. Mostly, the end result is that I don’t drink much at all. Boo, corn syrup.)

I did some reading on Splenda to see if it’d work for yeast and came up with conflicting results. Sucralose (the sweet part of Splenda) can’t be used by yeast (if it could, you could break it down as well and it’d be just like sugar). However, Splenda uses maltodextrin as a “bulking agent” since it’s 600 times sweeter than sugar. The maltodextrin makes it so that you can use about the same amount of Splenda as you would of sugar and get similar sweetnesses. Yeast can break down maltodextrin.

However, the Splenda website says that the maltodextrin doesn’t contain enough calories to get yeast started (they didn’t put it like that, of course). For breads, they suggest using 2T of sugar to get the yeast started and replacing the rest with Splenda. For the ginger beer, that’d be 1 and 5/8 cups of Splenda and 2T of sugar.

And remember, the yeast breaks down the sugar as it produces the carbonation, so you’re not actually drinking all of the sugar. If you got the mixture right, the yeast would eat through all of the sugar and leave just the Splenda for sweetening. That would have the added benefit of making sure that your bottles never explode (since the yeast would die out before producing enough CO2 to do damage). The only way to know how much sugar will give you the right amount of carbonation is to try it.

Currently, the recipe uses 1260 calories of sugar for 1 gallon (or about 10 12-oz sodas). The yeast probably eats through about 300 calories-worth, making each soda less than 90 calories (significantly less than a normal soda, which is around 125-145).

Also, since Mark is diabetic and his mom keeps giving us Splenda, do you think that would work to make a diet version? He drinks a ton of soda, so it’d be nice to be able to make it at home, but I have no idea if Splenda would affect the reactions needed to make the carbonation. Thoughts?

Thanks for making soda with me! Soon it will be time for us to go apple picking!