18th April: Gelling pt2

My containers arrived during the week, so I took advantage today of turning the kitchen into a scene from 'Breaking Bad' only I did not need to don HazMat gear or wear a respirator for this kind of chemical cookery.

The constituent parts.

As you can see, here's the complete set of stuff for the gels. The huge sack of maltodextrin is at the back dominating proceedings :)

Stirring and mixing the maltodextrin in to the water.

I decided to make the batch of 10 gels at double strength of the off-the-shelf varieties... So for 600ml of fluid it was to have around 400g of maltodextrin in it and 1200mg of caffeine - 3x the generally agreed 'safe' daily dose of caffeine.

Cookin' up.

I heated the maltodextrin and the water, stirring it all together till it was dissolved and added the caffeine. Once complete and had started to cool I added the flavouring, a little at a time... Tasting as I added it a bit at a time, unfortunately I went through the entire quantity of flavouring I had bought, as whilst it began to smell right and had a hint of the flavour, the taste of the gel itself was still very bitter. Completely committed I bottled them all up and left them overnight for tomorrow's excursion and to test them on myself and fellow guinea-pigs on my trip to the Swinley MTB trail centre.

All bottled-up and ready to go.

Eat pies.
Drink beer.
Run far.