We Made Pop Rocks at Home with Science

Pop Rocks are just sugar and high-pressure CO2, but making them at home is way harder than it looks. In this video, we use three different methods to try and capture carbon dioxide in sugar: a middle-school chemical reaction, a state transition, and biological production!

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Credits:
Executive Producers:
George Zaidan
Hilary Hudson

Producers:
Elaine Seward
Andrew Sobey
Darren Weaver

Writer/Host:
Alex Dainis, PhD

Scientific consultants:
Michelle Boucher, PhD
Leila Duman, PhD
Richard Hartel, PhD


Sources:

How much pressure is inside a pop rock:

Pop rocks were originally invented to be an instant soda:

Enzymes on your tongue convert CO2 into protons:

Your tongue detects CO2 as sour:

Why do we like carbonated foods?

Claire Saffitz Makes Pop Rocks

Citric Acid and Baking Soda Reaction:

Fizzy Fruit recipe:

Yeast produce CO2

What temperature kills yeast?

[AppliedScience]

I think your idea of using dry ice powder sounds really promising! You could sieve the particles for size consistency and fold into thin sheets of the cooling sugar. File the patent now ;)

[ACSReactions]

Want to see someone make pop rocks using carbon dioxide gas at home? Check out Applied Science’s YouTube channel!

[cimarronwoo]

A great way to do science, the essence of experimentation. Sometimes you succeed, sometimes you don’t. Either way you learn something.

[IanGrams]

Props for trying to figure out an at-home method. Also, I appreciate whoever on the graphics team made those alternative packages 😁

[unvergebeneid]

700 psi is 48 bar for all of us who don't know what a pound or a square inch is.

[kiedto]

"it's just taste like sweet yeasts"-truely a masterpiece of a reaction. keep doing more video like that

[Dixavd]

I didn't know Alex was working on this channel now. She's great. Love to see her more.

[tfofurn]

Internal monologue: "I am definitely spitting this out and I am definitely *not* giving footage of that to the editor." 😂

[rickray]

Bill Mitchell invented Pop Rocks while at General Foods. He also invented Cool Whip - taking a oil and water matrix and then incorporating air using a novel surface area technique. And of courseTang, used a stabilized acetaldehyde he created. He also did many other foods, but the chemistry was always ahead of its time.

[TYKUHN]

Me: Mom, can we have pop rocks?
Mom: We have pop rocks at home.
Pop rocks at home:

[user.user-user]

I'm so glad Reactions channel is alive AND! with Alex!

[daidnz]

The first one is what we call hokey pokey. It's sold covered with chocolate as a _Crunchie_ bar by Cadbury.

[gsus]

I can only imagine some exec saying "Yeah let's make pressurized glass bombs as food!". Great vid!

[FroToe]

And now Nile Blue shows us how it's really done. Yes, with the big tanks of CO2 and a pressure vessel capable of heating and stirring and filling with gas simultaneously. Oddly enough, he seemed to have the most trouble with the simple candy-making stage.

[Bacon]

Heeey I did this about ten years ago using the baking soda/citric acid recipe, and I added BACONSALT It was in 9 flavors at the time, like cheddar, jalapeno, mesquite, hickory, peppered, and maple bacon flavors. I made the fizzy candy in all 9 flavors. If you wait a bit to add the baking soda/citric acid, it won't foam up if it's mixed in at a lower temp. That foamy stuff looked awful lol. It was super fun to eat, salty and sweet, and it made funny toppings like bacon fizzy candy on macaroni and cheese, apple pie, and peach crepes. LOL fizzy bacon made everything fun, but it would have been better using real poprocks. You can buy them unflavored and add your own things, but it's not the same.

[.]

Makes me wonder if there's some pop rocks asmr out there 🤔

[Pobazca]

I think you could have encased the candy whilst hardening and/or carbonating, for the pressure to build up and make the CO2 more likely to disolve, and less likely to escape.

[anakimluke]

hey a heads up: the drums on the intro music seem to be a bit too loud! :)

[paraniomia]

"Sponge candy" sounds like it's equivalent to Violet Crumble or Crunchy bars.

[David_Lloyd-Jones]

Your fast-talking not-a-lawyer boyfriend is hilarious!