What Cream Does to a Soft Drink
Dirty soda came out of Utah and spread through social media before turning up on menus here. The formula is a soft drink base with syrup and cream stirred through, over ice. Adding dairy fat to a carbonated drink rounds off the acid and softens the sweetness, which is why a creamer version tastes closer to a cream soda than to the plain one it is built on.
Each creamer version adds roughly 190 kJ and about eighty five cents over its plain counterpart. The Strawberry Dream at 933 kJ becomes Strawberry Dream with Creamer at 1,122 kJ, and the Mango Breeze at 1,036 kJ becomes Mango Breeze with Creamer at 1,225 kJ, which is the heaviest in the range.
On flavour, the creamer makes most sense with strawberry and mango. Strawberries and cream is a pairing that predates fast food by centuries, and mango with dairy exists across South Asian cooking as lassi and kulfi. Cream against blue raspberry is the more unusual combination, though it works for the same acid softening reason.
The Dirty Cola at $7.25 is the odd one out, since cola is not a fruit flavour. What the cream does there is mute the phosphoric acid that gives cola its sharpness, producing something close to a cola float without the ice cream. It is the version to try if you find plain cola too sharp.
The Hungry Jack's Jack'd Up Sodas menu is a build rather than a product: a base soft drink, a syrup and cream, mixed at the counter. It is the newest range on the board.
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