Once a month, I get a couple chunks of dry ice in my Nutrisystem frozen food container, I think I look forward more to the DI than I do the food (it’s okay, not home cooking caliber, but no worse than fast food or other prepared ready to eat meals)
Anyway, I’ve been thinking out fun things to do with DI, beyond the standard “submerge in warm water”
So far, I’ve;
Submerged it in water to make CO2 fog
Put a small piece in soapy water to make “smoky bubbles”
Flash-frozen veggie slices
Made knife blades “sing”
Put a small chunk in a soda bottle with water, it made carbonated water
Extinguished a candle with the CO2 vapor falling on it
Looking for more ideas, I’m planning to scale the fire extinguishing experiment up, light a fire in our outdoor fireplace, and put a chunk of DI on the top of the fireplace chimmney, the CO2 vapor should extinguish the fire…
For some reason I didn’t see the parentheses and read that as “Put a chunk in a 2 liter bottle with water, seal with cap and duct tape, maybe back away.”
It was much funnier that way.
I haven’t tried it but i’d think you’d be able to make ice cream with it (assuming it’s food-grade dry ice). Chop up the dry ice into small pieces and drop it into some cold ice cream base and stir. I do this often with liquid nitrogen and it makes great ice cream (admittedly LN2 is much colder than dry ice).
Something else I’ve always wanted to dry is to make a “cold plate”. Make a slurry of dry ice and pure alcohol and place a frying pan or similar on top. The dry ice/alcohol will chill the pan below freezing and then you can drop food onto the pan. Popsical pancakes!
When I did Rocky Horror we did a trick with di that was rather fun. We ground it up in a food processor then put into popcorn buckets. Then for Eddie’s entrance we would toss the di high into the air, as it fell it created a wall of fog for Eddie to “crash” through. It was pretty damn cool.
I’ve done the dry ice ice cream thing. It works okay, but you get carbonated ice cream, which sounds better than it is. Also you have to make sure you make really fine powder, otherwise you get lumps.
I’ve also used grain alcohol and dry ice as the bath for a hand crank ice cream maker, which is much better. Best to put the alcohol in the freezer for a while first, then add the dry ice before putting it in the ice cream maker; it’s so cold that you really want to be cranking when you first add it, and any chunks of dry ice can jam the mechanism. But you get really solid ice cream in like five-ten minutes, which is awesome. I advise leaving it in the bath for a bit to harden, since its much colder than your freezer.
I used to get a few pounds for the kids to play with all the time.
In addition to all the normal experiments, they would put a chunk in a big bowl of hot water, and put it in the hallway near the attic fan. The suction of the fan would pull the “smoke” into a long, twisting tornado.
Fill a 5-gallon bucket with hot water. Put the bucket in the bed of a pickup truck, along with a full bottle of dishwashing soap, the dry ice, and yourself.
Have a friend drive the pickup around. When you’re somewhere appropriate, take the cap off the bottle of soap and dump it all into the hot water, then drop in the dry ice. The bed of the pickup will fill up with bubbles, which will break off in large chunks to waft gaily behind the pickup as you drive.
Take a flat piece of dry ice, and a quarter. Jam the quarter into the dry ice, maybe 1/3 of the way at most, at a bit of an angle. The quarter will start bouncing up and down rapidly as gas builds up under it and pops it up.