A new year and new adventures! I'm excited to try out some new experiments and learn MORE. Never stop growing! Before winter break I did a new experiment with my preschool class to make gummy juice noodles. I tried it at home with my 11 year old first and she was super excited to help because she realized she could make her own boba this way. Apparently boba is all the rage with 11 years olds. Who knew?
We started by adding sodium alginate powder to cranberry juice in a blender and blending on high for about 30 seconds. This produced a very bubbly solution, so then we had to let it sit on the counter for a few hours to settle. Many of the bubbles remained, so I poured it all into a saucepan and heated it gently. This worked to remove the bubbles, but then I had to wait for it to cool before using it.
We used syringes, pipets, and even spoons to transfer the alginate-juice mixture to a dilute calcium chloride bath.
This created a gelatinized layer on the outside of the alginate-juice shape that was transferred into the calcium chloride solution. If we added a drop at a time, the result was pearls. If we added a constant stream, the result was a long wiggly gummy noodle.
Sodium alginate is a biological polymer derived from seaweed. When we dissolve it in juice, you could think of it like long strands of string floating in solution. Once we add the alginate-juice to the calcium chloride bath, the sodium atoms of the sodium alginate molecules exchange with the calcium ions in solution. Sodium can only bond with one alginate molecule at a time, but calcium can bond with two. This effectively ties the strands together, creating something like a net of alginate molecules. It is this cross-linking that results in an edible gelled polymer.
Ta daaaa! We made boba!
