4 ms·

One pro-tip as I now somehow have a commercial bottling license these days: get pre-hydrated gum Arabic. Much easier to work with. Almost everybody who messes t

One pro-tip as I now somehow have a commercial bottling license these days: get pre-hydrated gum Arabic. Much easier to work with. Almost everybody who messes this up will make the mistake at the hydrating the gum Arabic stage. Blend it with any dry ingredients like sugar before using. If you can’t source it, I’m not going to tell you that you SHOULD pretend to be a bottling company and ask a gum provider to send you some free samples, but you could and the amount they send you will last the rest of your life. TIC gums is pretty awesome and if you’re into frozen desserts has some incredible gum mixtures for ice creams, sorbets, etc. Also, consider just using water soluble flavor concentrates and skipping emulsification all together. That’s what most pros do and it’s why Sprite isn’t cloudy like it would be if you used oils. My favorite suppliers that sell in consumer and pro-sumer qtys are Apex Flavors and Nature’s Flavors. This probably won’t work for Cola as I think some of those ingredients have all of their flavor molecules in the oils, but as a general rule, if you can buy it at the store and it is clear, it is made using water soluble. If it is brown it probably isn’t, hence the caramel color additive.

detritus 6mo ago
Posts like this are why I read HN comments first. Posts like this remind we how much better it is to be as part of a large trading bloc to be able to easily order/sample these sort of things, rather than it likely being a pain in the arse to get locally.
- cogman10 6mo ago
  IDK if it'd apply here, but there are technically laws on the books in the US against price and purchase discrimination for grocers. It was specifically one of the things Lina Khan was investigating on the way out of office and something I believe she's going to be using for the NYC grocery stores. A food seller isn't allowed to cut out a grocer because they are too small. However, I believe they get around this today by having minimum order sizes that make it impossible for a small grocer to handle. That's effectively how my small hometown grocer was driven out of business. The suppliers refused to work with them because they wanted them to order huge amounts of product that wouldn't work for my hometown with 300 people. So, the people running the store ended up just buying products from either costco or another grocery store a town over. The price hike they had to apply was simply too much for the local folk who ultimately also went to the nearby towns to save money instead of shopping locally.
  - fakedang 6mo ago
    And I'm guessing, without a local grocery store at the very least, your hometown is also a dying entity?
    - cogman10 6mo ago
      It's mixed. Several people ended up moving back as some of the older population died off. One new resident retired there and is running a mini-grocery store now as both a hobby and for some of the hunters that come through the town. But the town is dying/dead. There's really only 1 major business in town and the school. It's surrounded by farm land. In my father's day, it had everything from a hardware store, full service garage, a bowling ally, movie theater, restaurant, and dance hall. All that is gone now. In my youth the restaurant and grocery store were still around. You had to call ahead to the restaurant as they would only open in a call ahead fashion.
  - xarope 6mo ago
    can't several small hometown grocers get together to be able to make that volume/quantity? Surely that would be better than just buying from costco?
    - frereubu 6mo ago
      Parent comment said their hometown had 300 people, which I can't imagine would support more than one or, at most, two grocery stores.
    - tirant 6mo ago
      That’s exactly what small distributors are for.
    - robotbikes 6mo ago
      A lot of small co-op groceries and even food co-ops that are more like ordering clubs used to use a company called UNFI to put in their orders but I think they focused more on organic and other high end items but they were willing to service smaller stores so yeah it's probable. There was also IGA (independent grocers association) but I think most of the stores associated with that brand/network locally have closed down so not sure if it's a thing anymore. Many of the independent convenience stores here stock almost all of their groceries at Aldi.
atentaten 6mo ago
Why did you get a commercial bottling license?
- mattmaroon 6mo ago
  Well after software I wanted a life that involved a lot less computer usage and a lot more being on my feet. So now I sell beverages via a few food trucks and also syrups people can use to make draft sodas/mocktails. We make everything ourselves because we’re all-natural everything, with the lone exception of Coke products because you just can’t get people to drink anything else. I basically went from no real knowledge to being able to develop commercial-scale beverages and walk them through all phases of production. The money’s not as good as software (but decent) and being active rather than sedentary with most of my time has done wonders for my health and mood. Man was not meant to sit in one place for long hours daily and I’m just not a gym rat no matter how many times I tried so I just reengineered my life.
  - parallel 6mo ago
    That's a really inspiring story to me. Do you have any more info about your business e.g website or blog? (I realise these are computer things and exactly what you were moving away from.)
  - com2kid 6mo ago
    Seconded that I'd love to hear more. A couple years back I bought a "cooking from your garden" book that introduced my family to shrubs, and since then we've been making a lot of home made drinks. We mostly do different types of shrubs and tepeches. I've found that doing better than store bought isn't very hard, but I have no desire to try and scale any of my recipes. The other thing I used to do before I had a kid was make really fancy alcoholic snacks. Super labor intensive, but really good. For example I made a jello piña colada. I'd sweeten canned coconut cream with some white sugar on the stove, add gelatin, and some rum. let it cool a bit. Drain a can of pineapples and keep the juice, use the juice to make pineapple jello again mixed with rum, with a piece of pineapple in the middle. Join the two jellos when they are both half set. (I used silicone molds.) Tada! Bougie piña colada jello shots. With a kid now I am limiting my creativity to non-alcoholic drinks. 90% of the shrub recipes online are absurdly basic. Honestly doing "better than average" is easy because the bar is so damn low.
joshmn 6mo ago
What are your, um, favorite gum providers?
- mattmaroon 6mo ago
  Small scale: modernist pantry. Commercial scale: Ingredion’s TIC gums. Their pre-hydrated gum arabic is great.
  - valarauko 6mo ago
    Is the Modernist Pantry gum arabic pre hydrated?
    - mattmaroon 6mo ago
      I’m not sure, but they do sell some pre-hydrated gums and usually call them “perfected”. They are largely buying in commercial quantities and re-packaging for restaurant-scale use with their gums because a lot of the bigger ingredient companies that make the best products won’t sell in smaller than 50 lb (or sometimes even much larger) increments. Pre-hydrated gums are usually just hydrated and then spray dried ones.
      - valarauko 6mo ago
        I've used their "perfected" xanthan gum which is a separate SKU from their regular xanthan gum. At least for gum arabic they seem to only offer one SKU, so I'm guessing it's not prehydrated.
- pseingatl 6mo ago
  All gum arabica comes from Sudan. When the US imposed sanctions on Sudan, this product was exempted.
  - mattmaroon 6mo ago
    Ha yeah. That whole thing is kind of crazy.
hattmall 6mo ago
What do you use to bottle things in, like what bottles?
- pseingatl 6mo ago
  Perrier bottles can be emptied and resealed. I didn't see anything in the article about carbonation.
- HeyLaughingBoy 6mo ago
  Bottles are easy to find. I homebrew my own ginger ale and use Grolsch-style sealing caps to withstand the pressure. Buy them on Amazon.
- mattmaroon 6mo ago
  Depends what I’m bottling and if it needs to be shelf stable. There’s actually just as much work in the packaging of a beverage as the product sometimes.
user070223 6mo ago
Another fun use for gum arabic is making watercolor paints, you can do it with your kids sourcing the pigment from different soils. pour water and let the heavy big particle fall to the bottom and source the small ones from the top and mix some ingredients
- dzhiurgis 6mo ago
  Pigment from soils?
  - krisoft 6mo ago
    Not sure what you are asking. The stone age way of making paint is to find some place where the ground has a weird colour, dig it up, clean it and you have a pigment. Even to this day many of our paint pigments are mined this way. Red/yellow ochre, umber, sienna. If what you are asking is the dirt in question geologically speaking a soil? Sometimes, sometimes not. It can be a sediment or a regolith too. But in the more general laymen sense callig any dirt from the ground a soil is not too mistaken.
    - dzhiurgis 6mo ago
      Yeah I’ll probably stick with coca cola corporation
      - krisoft 6mo ago
        Okay, but user070223 is talking about watercolour paints as an alternative use of gum arabic. Now i’m just recognising this might be a language issue: watercolour paints are a type of paint to paint with on paper using a brush dipped in water. If you ever seen kids paint with brushes and paper most likely they were using watercolour paint.
  - azepoi 6mo ago
    Ochre is from a type of clay
- 6mo ago
sourcegrift 6mo ago
Thank you for helping contribute to reduced trust in the society. Fuck them big dudes, amirite?
- prodigycorp 6mo ago
  He's contributed to improving trust on this forum. And idk if you've ever gotten commercial samples before but he's right, the amount they give you is immaterial to hurting them and can be material to you. Also, he said that he's somehow stumbled into somehow having a commercial bottling license. If him, why not us?
  - diceduckmonk 6mo ago
    > the amount they give you is immaterial to hurting them and can be material to you. It’s immaterial to Apple if I stole an iPhone from the Apple Store too. > Also, he said that he's somehow stumbled into somehow having a commercial bottling license. If him, why not us? Because he is a commercial bottler who is sampling from different supplier that he intends to source from for his business.
helsinkiandrew 6mo ago
> Blend it with any dry ingredients like sugar before using. That's the key. I'm not an expert - and have only experience making/mixing liquids for cocktails - but Gum Arabic (often used to add a thicker mouthfeel in sugar syrups) isn't a great emulsifier but needs to be full homogenised with the oils before adding to more liquid - exceptionally high speed, aggressive blending for longer than it looks like is needed, to create tiny droplets which the gum arabic then stabilises, or the oil will end up separating after a few hours/days. Sucros Esters, Propylene Glycol, or Polysorbate 80 (which I haven't used) probably do a better job but only Sucros Esters could be considered 'natural'
jfengel 6mo ago
I wonder how they pulled off Crystal Pepsi. A neat trick, even if nobody cared.
- lagniappe 6mo ago
  The 90's were a magical place. Best we can do now is Clear Pepsi.
- jolt42 6mo ago
  Why? Is it just not put caramel coloring in it? It didn't taste like actual Pepsi to me, which I suppose might be more difficult?
  - jfengel 6mo ago
    The OP said (in the last paragraph) that the ingredients that go into colas are the kind that make the drink cloudy. Crystal Pepsi was clear, even without the coloring. Presumably it's because they changed to use flavors that are completely water-soluble. That would explain a difference in taste. (I know they tasted different with my eyes open, but I never did a blind taste test between the two. It would be interesting to know how close they really got to the original flavor.)
    - mattmaroon 6mo ago
      Yeah, that would be my guess. Crystal Pepsi tastes noticeably different than regular, and caramel color is used in such small qtys that it is considered borderline flavorless. If you look at popular grapefruit sodas Fresca is clear, but Squirt is cloudy because Fresca uses water soluble flavors and Squirt uses oils. (Squirt is the better product by far IMO because a lot of the grapefruit flavor is from the oil in the peel.) It’s always possible the geniuses at the flavor houses Pepsi buys from have some magic I don’t know about though. But I’ve never heard of any way to make emulsified oils clear, since they refract light differently.
  - subscribed 6mo ago
    Nile Red recreated "cola" drink close enough to the good stuff and of course published the recipe. Might want to try that :)
qmr 6mo ago
What's the use in ice cream? My ice cream is just ... ice cream. Cream, milk, sugar.
- hutattedonmyarm 6mo ago
  As an emulsifier, allowing the fats and the water to mix better. I _think_ it also might help to trap air bubbles. It helps you turn on the creaminess-knob
  - roryirvine 6mo ago
    Egg yolk is the usual emulsifier, in the UK at least - ice cream is essentially a frozen whipped custard.
    - hutattedonmyarm 6mo ago
      That’s also an option. I usually make mine without due to friends with egg allergies and vegan friends
- mattmaroon 6mo ago
  Several reasons. Texture and freeze-thaw stability are the main reasons. The latter being an issue for home use mainly. Your freezer’s self-defrost works by getting a little warm and then cold again. That causes ice crystals to melt and re-freeze, which is the opposite of what you want. Gums help with that and that’s why it’s in most of the ones you see at the grocery store. They also can be used to give body to things that don’t have as much protein, like sorbets.
anang 6mo ago
If I may ask a question… Nature’s flavors sells both extracts and concentrates that are water soluble. For a brown soda, like rootbeer, is an alcohol based extract preferred or should I go the concentrate route? I’ve been toying with the idea of making commercial style rootbeer at home, and making soda from roots just doesn’t cut it (even if it’s pretty good). I’ve been eying Nature’s flavors for a while, but since I’m not in the US it will be VERY expensive. There are no domestics providers of food safe wintergreen or sassafras. Thanks, and cool career switch!
- mattmaroon 6mo ago
  That’s a good question and it probably depends on the ingredient. Most of what we call flavors are a mix of volatile aromatic compounds. Some of those are fat soluble. Some water soluble. Alcohol is great for extracting as it can pull out both. The flavor extracted depends on what you’re extracting with and even the concentration. So really, you’d have to buy it and try. I’ve only ever made root beer a couple times for my own experimentation with oil. Nature’s Flavors is awesome though and you might ask them.

detritus 6mo ago

Posts like this are why I read HN comments first. Posts like this remind we how much better it is to be as part of a large trading bloc to be able to easily order/sample these sort of things, rather than it likely being a pain in the arse to get locally.

cogman10 6mo ago
IDK if it'd apply here, but there are technically laws on the books in the US against price and purchase discrimination for grocers. It was specifically one of the things Lina Khan was investigating on the way out of office and something I believe she's going to be using for the NYC grocery stores. A food seller isn't allowed to cut out a grocer because they are too small. However, I believe they get around this today by having minimum order sizes that make it impossible for a small grocer to handle. That's effectively how my small hometown grocer was driven out of business. The suppliers refused to work with them because they wanted them to order huge amounts of product that wouldn't work for my hometown with 300 people. So, the people running the store ended up just buying products from either costco or another grocery store a town over. The price hike they had to apply was simply too much for the local folk who ultimately also went to the nearby towns to save money instead of shopping locally.
- fakedang 6mo ago
  And I'm guessing, without a local grocery store at the very least, your hometown is also a dying entity?
  - cogman10 6mo ago
    It's mixed. Several people ended up moving back as some of the older population died off. One new resident retired there and is running a mini-grocery store now as both a hobby and for some of the hunters that come through the town. But the town is dying/dead. There's really only 1 major business in town and the school. It's surrounded by farm land. In my father's day, it had everything from a hardware store, full service garage, a bowling ally, movie theater, restaurant, and dance hall. All that is gone now. In my youth the restaurant and grocery store were still around. You had to call ahead to the restaurant as they would only open in a call ahead fashion.
- xarope 6mo ago
  can't several small hometown grocers get together to be able to make that volume/quantity? Surely that would be better than just buying from costco?
  - frereubu 6mo ago
    Parent comment said their hometown had 300 people, which I can't imagine would support more than one or, at most, two grocery stores.
  - tirant 6mo ago
    That’s exactly what small distributors are for.
  - robotbikes 6mo ago
    A lot of small co-op groceries and even food co-ops that are more like ordering clubs used to use a company called UNFI to put in their orders but I think they focused more on organic and other high end items but they were willing to service smaller stores so yeah it's probable. There was also IGA (independent grocers association) but I think most of the stores associated with that brand/network locally have closed down so not sure if it's a thing anymore. Many of the independent convenience stores here stock almost all of their groceries at Aldi.

atentaten 6mo ago

Why did you get a commercial bottling license?

mattmaroon 6mo ago
Well after software I wanted a life that involved a lot less computer usage and a lot more being on my feet. So now I sell beverages via a few food trucks and also syrups people can use to make draft sodas/mocktails. We make everything ourselves because we’re all-natural everything, with the lone exception of Coke products because you just can’t get people to drink anything else. I basically went from no real knowledge to being able to develop commercial-scale beverages and walk them through all phases of production. The money’s not as good as software (but decent) and being active rather than sedentary with most of my time has done wonders for my health and mood. Man was not meant to sit in one place for long hours daily and I’m just not a gym rat no matter how many times I tried so I just reengineered my life.
- parallel 6mo ago
  That's a really inspiring story to me. Do you have any more info about your business e.g website or blog? (I realise these are computer things and exactly what you were moving away from.)
- com2kid 6mo ago
  Seconded that I'd love to hear more. A couple years back I bought a "cooking from your garden" book that introduced my family to shrubs, and since then we've been making a lot of home made drinks. We mostly do different types of shrubs and tepeches. I've found that doing better than store bought isn't very hard, but I have no desire to try and scale any of my recipes. The other thing I used to do before I had a kid was make really fancy alcoholic snacks. Super labor intensive, but really good. For example I made a jello piña colada. I'd sweeten canned coconut cream with some white sugar on the stove, add gelatin, and some rum. let it cool a bit. Drain a can of pineapples and keep the juice, use the juice to make pineapple jello again mixed with rum, with a piece of pineapple in the middle. Join the two jellos when they are both half set. (I used silicone molds.) Tada! Bougie piña colada jello shots. With a kid now I am limiting my creativity to non-alcoholic drinks. 90% of the shrub recipes online are absurdly basic. Honestly doing "better than average" is easy because the bar is so damn low.

joshmn 6mo ago

What are your, um, favorite gum providers?

mattmaroon 6mo ago
Small scale: modernist pantry. Commercial scale: Ingredion’s TIC gums. Their pre-hydrated gum arabic is great.
- valarauko 6mo ago
  Is the Modernist Pantry gum arabic pre hydrated?
  - mattmaroon 6mo ago
    I’m not sure, but they do sell some pre-hydrated gums and usually call them “perfected”. They are largely buying in commercial quantities and re-packaging for restaurant-scale use with their gums because a lot of the bigger ingredient companies that make the best products won’t sell in smaller than 50 lb (or sometimes even much larger) increments. Pre-hydrated gums are usually just hydrated and then spray dried ones.
    - valarauko 6mo ago
      I've used their "perfected" xanthan gum which is a separate SKU from their regular xanthan gum. At least for gum arabic they seem to only offer one SKU, so I'm guessing it's not prehydrated.
pseingatl 6mo ago
All gum arabica comes from Sudan. When the US imposed sanctions on Sudan, this product was exempted.
- mattmaroon 6mo ago
  Ha yeah. That whole thing is kind of crazy.

hattmall 6mo ago

What do you use to bottle things in, like what bottles?

pseingatl 6mo ago
Perrier bottles can be emptied and resealed. I didn't see anything in the article about carbonation.
HeyLaughingBoy 6mo ago
Bottles are easy to find. I homebrew my own ginger ale and use Grolsch-style sealing caps to withstand the pressure. Buy them on Amazon.
mattmaroon 6mo ago
Depends what I’m bottling and if it needs to be shelf stable. There’s actually just as much work in the packaging of a beverage as the product sometimes.

user070223 6mo ago

Another fun use for gum arabic is making watercolor paints, you can do it with your kids sourcing the pigment from different soils. pour water and let the heavy big particle fall to the bottom and source the small ones from the top and mix some ingredients

dzhiurgis 6mo ago
Pigment from soils?
- krisoft 6mo ago
  Not sure what you are asking. The stone age way of making paint is to find some place where the ground has a weird colour, dig it up, clean it and you have a pigment. Even to this day many of our paint pigments are mined this way. Red/yellow ochre, umber, sienna. If what you are asking is the dirt in question geologically speaking a soil? Sometimes, sometimes not. It can be a sediment or a regolith too. But in the more general laymen sense callig any dirt from the ground a soil is not too mistaken.
  - dzhiurgis 6mo ago
    Yeah I’ll probably stick with coca cola corporation
    - krisoft 6mo ago
      Okay, but user070223 is talking about watercolour paints as an alternative use of gum arabic. Now i’m just recognising this might be a language issue: watercolour paints are a type of paint to paint with on paper using a brush dipped in water. If you ever seen kids paint with brushes and paper most likely they were using watercolour paint.
- azepoi 6mo ago
  Ochre is from a type of clay
6mo ago

sourcegrift 6mo ago

Thank you for helping contribute to reduced trust in the society. Fuck them big dudes, amirite?

prodigycorp 6mo ago
He's contributed to improving trust on this forum. And idk if you've ever gotten commercial samples before but he's right, the amount they give you is immaterial to hurting them and can be material to you. Also, he said that he's somehow stumbled into somehow having a commercial bottling license. If him, why not us?
- diceduckmonk 6mo ago
  > the amount they give you is immaterial to hurting them and can be material to you. It’s immaterial to Apple if I stole an iPhone from the Apple Store too. > Also, he said that he's somehow stumbled into somehow having a commercial bottling license. If him, why not us? Because he is a commercial bottler who is sampling from different supplier that he intends to source from for his business.

helsinkiandrew 6mo ago

> Blend it with any dry ingredients like sugar before using. That's the key. I'm not an expert - and have only experience making/mixing liquids for cocktails - but Gum Arabic (often used to add a thicker mouthfeel in sugar syrups) isn't a great emulsifier but needs to be full homogenised with the oils before adding to more liquid - exceptionally high speed, aggressive blending for longer than it looks like is needed, to create tiny droplets which the gum arabic then stabilises, or the oil will end up separating after a few hours/days. Sucros Esters, Propylene Glycol, or Polysorbate 80 (which I haven't used) probably do a better job but only Sucros Esters could be considered 'natural'

jfengel 6mo ago

I wonder how they pulled off Crystal Pepsi. A neat trick, even if nobody cared.

lagniappe 6mo ago
The 90's were a magical place. Best we can do now is Clear Pepsi.
jolt42 6mo ago
Why? Is it just not put caramel coloring in it? It didn't taste like actual Pepsi to me, which I suppose might be more difficult?
- jfengel 6mo ago
  The OP said (in the last paragraph) that the ingredients that go into colas are the kind that make the drink cloudy. Crystal Pepsi was clear, even without the coloring. Presumably it's because they changed to use flavors that are completely water-soluble. That would explain a difference in taste. (I know they tasted different with my eyes open, but I never did a blind taste test between the two. It would be interesting to know how close they really got to the original flavor.)
  - mattmaroon 6mo ago
    Yeah, that would be my guess. Crystal Pepsi tastes noticeably different than regular, and caramel color is used in such small qtys that it is considered borderline flavorless. If you look at popular grapefruit sodas Fresca is clear, but Squirt is cloudy because Fresca uses water soluble flavors and Squirt uses oils. (Squirt is the better product by far IMO because a lot of the grapefruit flavor is from the oil in the peel.) It’s always possible the geniuses at the flavor houses Pepsi buys from have some magic I don’t know about though. But I’ve never heard of any way to make emulsified oils clear, since they refract light differently.
- subscribed 6mo ago
  Nile Red recreated "cola" drink close enough to the good stuff and of course published the recipe. Might want to try that :)

qmr 6mo ago

What's the use in ice cream? My ice cream is just ... ice cream. Cream, milk, sugar.

hutattedonmyarm 6mo ago
As an emulsifier, allowing the fats and the water to mix better. I _think_ it also might help to trap air bubbles. It helps you turn on the creaminess-knob
- roryirvine 6mo ago
  Egg yolk is the usual emulsifier, in the UK at least - ice cream is essentially a frozen whipped custard.
  - hutattedonmyarm 6mo ago
    That’s also an option. I usually make mine without due to friends with egg allergies and vegan friends
mattmaroon 6mo ago
Several reasons. Texture and freeze-thaw stability are the main reasons. The latter being an issue for home use mainly. Your freezer’s self-defrost works by getting a little warm and then cold again. That causes ice crystals to melt and re-freeze, which is the opposite of what you want. Gums help with that and that’s why it’s in most of the ones you see at the grocery store. They also can be used to give body to things that don’t have as much protein, like sorbets.

anang 6mo ago

If I may ask a question… Nature’s flavors sells both extracts and concentrates that are water soluble. For a brown soda, like rootbeer, is an alcohol based extract preferred or should I go the concentrate route? I’ve been toying with the idea of making commercial style rootbeer at home, and making soda from roots just doesn’t cut it (even if it’s pretty good). I’ve been eying Nature’s flavors for a while, but since I’m not in the US it will be VERY expensive. There are no domestics providers of food safe wintergreen or sassafras. Thanks, and cool career switch!

mattmaroon 6mo ago
That’s a good question and it probably depends on the ingredient. Most of what we call flavors are a mix of volatile aromatic compounds. Some of those are fat soluble. Some water soluble. Alcohol is great for extracting as it can pull out both. The flavor extracted depends on what you’re extracting with and even the concentration. So really, you’d have to buy it and try. I’ve only ever made root beer a couple times for my own experimentation with oil. Nature’s Flavors is awesome though and you might ask them.