A phenomenon I’ve noticed - ice made in the ice maker of the 'fridge causes soda to foam more than ice that is made in ice trays. It has reached the point that I pour the soda first, then put the ice in (no foaming action).
Any ideas has to why this could be?
This is just a guess, but when you make ice in trays, you get a solid block of ice, usually there’s no air trapped in there. When the ice maker makes it, it must trap some air in there due to the way it does things, so as it melts to cool the soda, those air bubbles come out and wake up the CO[sub]2[/sub] particles inside the soda, making it foam.
But really, I have no idea. Interesting observation though.
Hope you don’t mind if I add a question:
Why does sticking my finger in the soda foam make it go away faster?
WAG - another surface for the bubbles to burst against??
Gp
Body heat?
The little crescent shapes made by the icemaker have more surface area for their volume than do the larger blocks from the trays. Not only does that let them cool your drink faster, but there are more nucleation sites available for CO2 to come out of solution.
My WAG on the bubbles and the soda is it may have something to do with the oil on your fingers and surface tension. Just a guess…You can pour yourself a soda and put a drop of oil in it to test this theory out…
IMHO, I find rinsing the ice off before adding the soda reduces this problem. I guess it smooths out the surface and remove the small ice crystals that act as nucleation sites. Also, IHMO again, it removes some of the freezer taste from the cubes. My wife keeps dead grubs in there(Rhinocerous Beetle Larvae), so got to rinse the cubes.
“Why does sticking my finger in the soda foam make it go away faster?”
Anyone that’s ever been to a kegger (or plans to go to one), should know that the best way to get rid of foam in a carbonated drink is to use a finger to wipe the oil from the side of your nose and then stir it in the foam. I know, it sounds gross, but trust me, it works. And after a few beers, it really doesn’t seem that gross anymore.
From what I understood, it was the salt on your skin that killed the foam- we used tortilla chips to do this, too.
Going back to the ice question:
Does anyone have a good recipe for ice? That is, sometimes when I make ice in plastic ice cube trays, the ice comes out perfect, I twist the trays and they all pop out nicely; however, half the time, the cubes refuse to come out, even after running water on the bottom, and I end up with shattered ice cubelets…
There are chemicals, some naturally occurring, called surfactants that can cause foam by stabilizing the surfaces of bubbles. They kind of act as an intermediary between the air molecules and the water molecules, which normally don’t want to be in contact. Foam in beer is presumably caused by some kind(s) of naturally-occurring surfactant(s).
But there’s another class of surfactants called defoamers that have the opposite effect. If you’re making latex traffic paint for example, once you start mixing it vigorously to disperse the pigment you very quickly generate gigantic amounts of foam (because the mix contains at least a couple of surfactants), but if you stir in a relatively small amount of a commercial defoamer most of the foam disappears right away. Apparently, the oil on your nose acts as a natural defoamer.
Every description I’ve ever read about how defoamers work has been vague and impenetrable, and as far as I know they’re mostly developed empirically (or used to be), so I think the defoaming process isn’t understood well. (Not by me, anyway.) But I know some of the commercial ones include little silica particles that help make holes in bubble surfaces, so maybe the salt in nose grease does something similar to help the oils break the foam.
Hope you don’t mind if I add a question:
Why does sticking my finger in the soda foam make it go away faster? **
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The Reason sticking your finger in soda makes the foam go away faster is because of the salt in your skin. (That’s what I was told by a Computer tech who was visiting our office and suggested that I do this cuz someone shook up my soda)
Recipe for ice cubes:
Fill the tray up by putting the (slow) stream of tap water into the first cube-depression and let it run between the other depressions until it fills itself up.
I’ve found (and believe me, it was a miracle) that getting some water in those little dimples between the cube depressions really helps in the crasking process.
Higher-filled cubes = easier to crack out of the tray.
If you don’t have a tray with dimples connecting each cube depression, i suggest going out to get that kind. they seem to work much nicer than the others.
I think it’s more likely to be skin oils that kill the foam than salt (tortilla chips are also pretty oily).
A bit on It appears (to me) that the Ice Cube Maker Ice is rougher than Tray Ice. The roughness seems to provide more nucleation sites.