[Sca-cooks] FREEZING WINE......

[Randy Goldberg MD]

> (Who wonders how come he can't get Icees and such in diet at the
> convenience stores. Two or more flavors of sugared stuff. But seldom,
> if ever, a diet version.)

Because it's the sugar that makes your Icee/Slurpee slushy. Same principle -
dissolve stuff in water, and it freezes at a lower temperature - so you get
small crystals of plain water ice suspended in a concentrated syrup which
won't really freeze at all. Artificial sweeteners are so much more powerful
than sugar that if you used enough artificial sweetener to make this
freezing-point shift occur, it would be inedible. Nutrasweet, by the way,
isn't calorie-free - it's just SO much more powerful than sugar that the
amount you need to generate the same amount of sweetness has a negligible
number of calories. A teaspoon of PURE aspartame (a packet of Nutrasweet is
mostly fillers) is vastly sweeter than a teaspoon of pure sucrose - but has
about the same number of calories, 16. The difference, again, is that you
need only a tiny fraction of that teaspoon of aspartame to get as much
subjective sweetness as the whole teaspoon of sugar.

Avraham