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ECTO SURGE
Every year, the city of Chicago dyes the Chicago River green on St. Patrick’s Day. The whole river looks as though it’s flowing with Ecto Cooler, or Surge Soda, two long-lost green drinks whose flavor was sort of tangerine-like (though you can bet that neither ever had anything close to a tangerine in the recipe).
Alas, poor Slimer. I knew him, Egon. A fellow of infinite tanginess...
You can use pretty much the same recipe to recreate both of those drinks, and there are lots of different recipes online. However, no two people seem to remember the flavors of these drinks in exactly the same way (even if you found a fresh can of the stuff it probably wouldn’t taste QUITE like you remember), so here’s a recipe for each that can easily be adapted a bit to your taste. It may not be quite authentic (it’ll never be quite right to us unless it’s served out of one of those big tin 56oz Hi-C cans that that you needed to poke holes in), but it’s a good approximation of what we remember:
Basic Cooler-style Drink:
3/4ths of a packet of Lemon Lime Kool-Aid mix
3 heaping tablespoons of Tang drink mix
3/4ths cup of sugar
1 tablespoon of lemon juice
1/4th cup orange juice.
Mix all together and stir, and you’ve got yourself a bright green Ecto-type drink! You use a bit less sugar than you normally would when making Kool Aid, because there’s already sugar in the Tang mix. Taste a spoonful to see if it’s quite what you remember, and you can add small amounts of more Tang, orange juice, or Lemon Lime powder to adjust. Our first attempt tasted a bit too strong and actually had to be watered down a bit to hit the “sweet spot.”
SURGE IT UP:
Take one cup of of the cooler base, adding a hint more tang powder or orange juice, and boil with 1 cup of sugar to make a syrup that looks and tastes similar to the long-lost green pop. Mix 1 part syrup with 4-8 parts carbonated water.
We can help you resurrect a few other old favorites in Bootleg Soda! Check back on Monday for some old time soda fountain formulas! |
Bootleg Soda: Ecto Surge
Another excerpt from Bootleg Soda: A Smart Aleck's Guide. Also known as: "What happened when we got one of those SodaStream things at HQ and didn't like the syrups you could buy for it." We're putting up excerpts here all week!
