Turning cotton balls into cotton candy

about two years ago i became convinced that there was a way to turn cotton balls into edible and hopefully tasty cotton candy at first this idea seemed a bit ridiculous but i knew that it should have been possible this is because cotton even though it doesn't seem like it at all is technically entirely sugar the only problem is that all this sugar or more specifically glucose is trapped in something called cellulose as cellulose it acts like a completely different material and we can use it to make things like cotton balls and clothing at its core though it's all just sugar so what i dreamed of doing was breaking down cotton balls back into sugar and then turning them into candy i didn't just want to make any candy though and i specifically wanted to make cotton candy i wanted to make literal cotton candy to get started the first thing that i had to do was figure out how to even do it i had to come up with a way to break down the cellulose back into sugar and my first idea was to use an enzyme this was because i had already used an enzyme for another project where i turned toilet paper into drinkable alcohol and it had worked really well for that one i used an enzyme called cellulase and i was able to break down the toilet paper which is also entirely cellulose this gave me a solution of sugar which i fermented to alcohol using yeast and then i distilled it to make my toilet paper moonshine the whole process ended up being surprisingly efficient and i figured it was the best place to start the only issue was that the enzyme i'd used wasn't pure and it was mixed with maltodextrin and cornstarch both of these were sugars but they weren't fermentable by yeast so none of it turned into alcohol and they didn't at all interfere with that project however for this one i couldn't have any extra sugar floating around it would be almost impossible to separate it from the sugar that i made and it would just be a huge mess i had to find somewhere to buy the pure enzyme and the easiest and cheapest source seemed to be alibaba it was pretty easy to go on find a listing and order the enzyme but actually getting what i wanted turned out to be a huge pain the first and biggest problem was that i never knew if it was actually going to be sugar-free i always asked and they would confirm that it was but it never seemed fully believable also the canadian government kept seizing the packages and holding them for months this one by far had to be the worst one that i got customs had apparently torn it open and repackaged it by just throwing it into a loose plastic bag it was also brown which immediately told me that it wasn't very pure and i could tell there was sugar in it because it was sticky when i touched it it took months but i eventually got one that seemed decent and it of course arrived as ginseng extract it was an off-white but still pure powder and it didn't seem to have any fillers or sugars when i tried it on the cotton though it just didn't work very well i think the enzyme itself was good quality and the cotton was just really stubborn i knew that it would be a bit harder to break down than toilet paper but i didn't expect it to be as bad as it was i was never really able to do it and after trying for a while i basically gave up about a year later though i got really inspired for some reason and i decided to attempt this project again i read every single book article or paper that i could find and i slowly put something together my biggest challenge was that i didn't want to have to use any specialized equipment or weird chemicals and i wanted it to be as simple as possible i also ideally wanted the sugar that i made to taste good or at the very least not poison me after about a week i ended up coming up with something that i thought could work instead of using enzyme to break down the cotton i would just use acid and the process seemed to be surprisingly simple so i decided to just jump right into it and i picked up an entire bag of cotton balls i went with the large ones just because i felt like it and it looked like a lot but it was only about 77 grams now the next main ingredient that i needed was some 98 concentrated sulfuric acid for all this cotton i calculated that i needed 230 grams of it and i poured it directly onto 70 grams of ice this almost immediately caused most of the ice to melt and when it was all added i turned on the stirring what i was doing here was just diluting the sulfuric acid and bringing the concentration down from 98 to 75. i also used ice to do this because it generated a lot of heat and the whole solution was now probably around 60c or 140 fahrenheit if i'd used regular water instead of ice it probably would have violently boiled and splashed which wouldn't have been ideal but anyway when it looked like it was all mixed i turned off the stirring and i let it cool down to room temperature about 30 minutes later it was good to go and i pulled out the stir bar it was now time to add the cotton and i started with just one ball i then poked it around a bit and it almost immediately started falling apart in general cotton's usually pretty tough and i thought that it was interesting to see it just disintegrate it only took a minute for it to become a little gooey blob and i felt that i was ready to add the rest so i carefully loaded in a small handful and it looked like it was barely gonna fit at first this was a bit concerning because this was only a small fraction of what i had to add with just a bit of poking around and stirring though it slowly disappeared into the acid i then continued adding the rest of the cotton and i was honestly a bit worried that it wasn't gonna be able to eat the whole bag now as far as i know there was no major reaction going on here and the cotton was just getting dissolved i wasn't able to find much info about it but it seems like the sulfuric acid was probably just interacting with the cellulose it was forming a complex around their hydroxyl groups which normally help the fibers stay tightly packed together this was causing them to separate and fall apart and dissolve into the acid it really didn't seem like it was gonna work but i was able to fit the whole bag now at this point things were looking pretty good but to fully dissolve the cotton i had to warm it up a bit so i dropped it into a hot water bath at 50c and i let it sit there for 30 minutes when it was done it looked like all the cotton had disappeared and i pulled it out of the bath i then poured it into 456 milliliters of boiling hot water this diluted the acid even more and it brought it down from the 75 percent that i had before to 27 i then washed out the beaker with a bit of water to make sure that i transferred everything and i added a thermometer i now had to keep this at 85c and even though it didn't look like much was happening it was the most important step in the other one the cotton had just been dissolved but here it was actually getting chopped up the long cellulose fibers were being attacked by the acid and water and they were breaking the bonds between the sugar units this type of reaction is called a hydrolysis reaction and they were breaking it down into smaller and smaller pieces i had to keep it running like this for two hours and in that time it should fully break down into glucose when it was done it looked about the same and i poured all of this into an even larger beaker this one was surrounded with ice to help cool things down but it was still gonna take a while so in the meantime i prepared something else that i needed i went and got some of my food-grade calcium carbonate which is basically just chalk i would be using this to neutralize all the sulfuric acid but i couldn't just throw it in as a powder i had to make it into a slurry and based on my calculations i needed about 245 grams so i measured that out and added 125 ml of water i then stirred it around and after a few minutes it was good to go when everything eventually cooled down to around room temperature i started adding the goopy chalk it reacted almost immediately with the sulfuric acid and it was releasing a lot of co2 gas this was all being generated as the acid was being neutralized and the acid itself was turning into calcium sulfate the only problem was that i had to add the chalk in small amounts or else it would bubble out of the beaker this was a very slow process and it was going okay until it eventually got a bit too thick this happened because the calcium sulfate was practically insoluble in water and it was all separating out so to fix this i occasionally added some extra water to loosen things up and it seemed to help i also added some more water to the chalk and i slowly added the rest of it at some point it really started looking way too much like iced coffee and it was a bit scary how much i wanted to taste it that would have been a horrible idea though and it would have tasted absolutely awful but anyway i was eventually done adding the chalk and when i tested the ph it told me that it was roughly neutral what i had now was hopefully a mixture of calcium sulfate and dirty sugar water and the next step was to filter it i poured in as much as i could into the filter but it wasn't even close to fitting everything i was only able to add what looked like half of it and i was gonna have to do this in two batches after loading up as much as i could i turned on the vacuum and i started pulling out the water this was all being drained into a flask below the filter and i was getting some nice and clear dark liquid when the stuff in the filter looked dry i added some water i then mixed it around and i was doing this to wash out any sugar that might have been stuck in the calcium sulfate this was then all pulled through and i washed it a second time now i had to deal with the other half of the stuff so i washed the filter and i added everything that was left in the beaker it was all just barely able to fit and i turned on the vacuum just like before i pulled it all through and i washed it twice with some water in the flask below i was left with a bunch of dark liquid this was all hopefully some dirty sugar water but up until now i had no idea if i had actually made any sugar to figure this out though it was actually pretty easy and i just had to use a glucose test strip this is normally used to check for sugar in pee and i was a bit worried that it would tell me that there was nothing however it actually gave me some really good results it told me that there was for sure glucose in there and that there was probably a decent amount the only problem was that it was still full of impurities side products and leftover acid and what i had to do next was try and clean it up a bit to do this i figured the easiest way was to use something called a mixed ion exchange resin at first this might sound a bit fancy and it kind of is but it's actually super simple to use it's also commonly used to purify aquarium water so it's pretty cheap and quite easy to buy i got all my resin from amazon and all i did was put it in this plastic tube now to clean the dirty sugar solution i just had to pour it through as it passed over the resin it pulled out anything that was charged and this included things like acid and salts the sugar itself though was a neutral molecule and it shouldn't have been affected by it it even got rid of some of the color and after just one run it was looking a lot lighter i then swapped out the beaker for another container and i passed it all through again i was doing this just to really make sure that i pulled out as much junk as possible when it was done i washed the resin with some extra water and at this point it should have been relatively pure besides the obvious orange color there should have been practically no salts or acid however the main issue now was that there was still way too much water and i had to get rid of most of it so after pouring it all into this large dish i threw it into a food dehydrator this is normally meant for things like peppers or fruit and it's basically just a warm box with a fan i then ran it until i felt that it was low enough which ended up taking about 35 hours after that i took it out and i poured it all into a beaker it was just slightly over 400 mils and now that it was more concentrated it was a bit darker it was also slightly acidic and it had a bit of a weird smell this unfortunately meant that i had to go back to the ion exchange resin this time though i did it in a different tube that i made from a water bottle this one had a valve at the bottom that i could close so everything wouldn't pass through right away i also included a bunch of activated charcoal along with the resin which i was hoping would help with the smell in color after everything was added i stirred it around and then i let it sit there i wasn't sure how long i had to leave it and based on almost nothing i decided that 5 hours was probably good over that time i just randomly stirred it every so often and it did get noticeably lighter when it hit the 5 hour mark i opened the valve and i drained everything out i washed everything with a bit of extra water and it was now hopefully cleaner the only thing that i didn't like was that it looked a bit cloudy to fix this i tried pouring it through some cotton and sea light but i don't think that did much of anything in any case what i had now was still way better and it no longer had a weird smell it basically just smelled like water and it also wasn't acidic the only issue was that there was still way too much water so i put it back into the dehydrator i then ran it until it looked like it was almost all gone when i felt that it was done i pulled it out and i put it into an even smaller container this one was made of silicone and if i had made any sugar i was hoping that it wouldn't stick to it after that i put it back in and i ran it until it looked like the volume stayed constant when it eventually looked like it was done i took it out i was really hoping to see some nice and crunchy sugar but that of course wasn't the case only this part in the corner kind of looked like it was solid i thought that maybe it was just having a hard time crystallizing so i covered it and i put it in the freezer for a couple days when i took it out i thought that it was looking really promising however it wasn't it was all goopy and honestly a bit disappointing but i was still kind of happy even though it wasn't nice and crunchy the texture more or less confirmed that it was sugar there weren't very many other things that i could have made here that would be sticky and gooey like this i wasn't exactly sure why it wasn't completely solid but i figured it was probably because i just didn't dry it enough there was still some water in there making it all sticky and unfortunately i had to get it out if i tried putting this into a cotton candy machine it would be an absolute mess to dry it i put together this little setup which is just an upside down tray on a hot plate with a baking sheet on top i then scraped off all the sugar which totally stuck to the silicone and i transferred it all here i slowly turned up the heating and i brought it up to just above 100 c to boil off the water i let it bubble like this for a while and after several minutes it was probably pretty dry i still wasn't done though because even with it dry i knew that it still wouldn't work to make cotton candy this was because i had already done a few basic tests using pure glucose and it had completely failed i had no idea why but it only seemed to work when the glucose was partially caramelized so i slowly raised the temperature of the hot plate and i brought it up to 185 c under this high heat the sugar was hopefully caramelizing which actually meant that it was re-polymerizing this was basically the exact opposite of what i did to make the sugar and i was rebuilding them back into slightly longer chains it would still be edible though and it would never go back to being like cotton my only issue here was that i had no idea how long i had to heat it for and i was also really afraid of burning it i ended up letting it go until i felt that it looked good which took about an hour i then pulled it off the hot plate and i waited for it to cool down to room temperature after half an hour it looked exactly the same and for a second i thought that it was still all goopy when i poked at it though it was completely solid and it also looked and felt like candy i was pretty happy with how it turned out and it was a lot more sugar than i needed it was also a lot more than i ever expected to get especially after my failures with the enzyme however the yield was technically kind of crappy and i only got about 20 grams in theory i probably should have gotten at least 50. this meant that i had lost a lot along the way and i honestly have no idea where it went i'm thinking that a lot of it might have gotten trapped in the exchange resin or in all the calcium sulfate or maybe in general the process just wasn't super efficient either way i never expected this process to be amazing and 20 grams was more than enough i was also honestly still kind of amazed that i'd even managed to get any sugar at all even though i had done this all myself i still thought that it was hard to believe that this used to be a bag of cotton balls one thing though was that i still wasn't 100 sure that this was sugar i mean i had tested it with a glucose strip but i felt that there was only one way to fully confirm it up until now i had completely resisted tasting it and i was really anxious to try it if there was anything else in there it would probably taste really bad or sour and i was honestly kind of expecting that to happen okay so i guess i'll just taste one of the little pieces mmm it tastes pretty good it's just caramelized sugar yeah that's it that's my whole review done okay so it was actually a lot better than i expected and it didn't even have a hint of a weird flavor but anyway i guess it was now time to try and turn it into cotton candy to do this i figured that all i needed was a cotton candy machine and i bought one from amazon now in theory based on the instructions all i had to do was wait for it to heat up and drop in my sugar so i waited for about 5 or 10 minutes and i nervously took out my precious little pieces i then dropped some in and i turned on the spinner i was really hoping to see some nice puffs of cotton candy but that didn't happen all it did was shoot out a sad brown liquid when i saw this i was honestly pretty disappointed yeah and i wasn't sure why it failed it just shot it all out it just shot it was liquid sugar i just picked it based on my small tests i was really expecting it to just work but then again i'm not some sort of cotton candy master cut it didn't work see that's what i feared i ended up trying it a few more times and it just never seemed to work at first i had no idea why it was failing like this but i started thinking that the melting point of my candy was just too low if that were the case it might just be having a hard time freezing as it flew through the air this machine was designed for table sugar or sucrose which melts at 186 but glucose melts around 146 c and my sugar was probably even lower i was hoping that this would have been fixed by caramelizing it but i guess i didn't caramelize it enough i think it just has to be more caramelized so i scraped off all the sugar from my sad and failed attempts and i put it back onto the silicone baking sheet i then heated it up again to about 200 c i had no idea how long i had to cook it for and again i was a bit afraid of burning it over 20 minutes it darkened a bit more and when i eventually felt that it was good i took it off the heat i then let it cool down like before and i broke it into a bunch of smaller pieces okay so i was now ready to try again and i was kind of expecting the same results in theory the caramelization should have fixed things but i was a bit scared because if it didn't i was kind of out of ideas there was only one way to find out though and i dropped some pieces into the machine [Music] i then turned it on and now i just had to wait in the meantime i got ready by climbing up on my little ladder it was a little awkward but i found that reaching over the camera was the only decent way to film this i was half expecting it to almost immediately just shoot out as goo again but that didn't seem to be happening in fact it didn't seem to be doing much of anything [Applause] taking a lot longer i kept waiting and i was a bit worried that it would just burn or something but then there was suddenly a bunch of nice fluff i then quickly used the stick and i tried collecting it and it was actually working the first thing that i noticed though was that it looked a lot thicker than regular cotton candy i mean it was all yellow and the machine sounded like it was dying but it was still pretty exciting when it eventually looked like it wasn't making anymore i turned off the machine oh my god okay so apparently that worked and even though it was probably the saddest and most pathetic cotton candy i'd ever seen i was still really happy with it i also really wanted to know how it tasted i mean it tastes like regular cotton candy just a lot more burnt it's not bad but it's also not good the only major issue with it besides looking and tasting like industrial grade cotton candy was that it didn't last very long even though it was able to solidify it seemed like it wanted to melt in just a few minutes it had shrank quite a bit and it had gotten a lot harder all the work all of my work to get this before it completely died though i broke off a piece of it and i compared it to a cotton ball in my opinion they were shockingly similar and the cotton candy kind of just looked like a really used and dirty one but anyway in the end i guess i was successful at turning cotton balls into cotton candy i mean it wasn't the most efficient transformation and the quality wasn't exactly the best but it was still a lot better than i expected and i'm really happy with how it turned out for now though i think i'm done messing around with sugar and i'm gonna focus on some other projects like turning plastic gloves into hot sauce okay so now is when i would normally have a sponsorship but i've decided not to have one for this video instead i want to take the time to announce that i'm finally selling t-shirts again the first shirt is the original design that i sold years ago and there have been a lot of people wondering where it went the other one is a new design and personally i like how it's nice and discreet right now these shirts will only be available for two weeks and i'm not sure if or when they'll be available again so if you want to pick one up or just support the channel there's a link in the description my goal in general with this is to be more self-sustaining and to not rely on sponsorships anymore but i guess i'll have to see how this goes as usual a big thanks goes out to all my supporters on patreon everyone who supports me can see all my new videos at least 24 hours before i post them to youtube you'll also get access to all the older videos that i had to take down and if you support me with five dollars or more you'll get your name at the end like you see here so [Music] you

Channel: NileRed

Views: 6,818,379

Keywords: nilered, nile, red, science, chemistry, turning, cotton, ball, cotton balls, cotton candy, glucose, cellulose, candy, edible, transformation, sugar, sweet

Id: vHuFizITMdA

Length: 29min 51sec (1791 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 03 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/Roofofcar]

Lol the right side of the thumb vs the actual result is prime material for /r/ExpectationVsReality.

Another great video. The fact that he uploads his videos even when he fails is great because I had no idea if it was going to work or not.

Edit: to be clear, this is a big success