One thing I love when Megan Fitzpatrick teaches in our storefront is that I am exiled from the bench room, and I need to amuse myself without woodworking tools or loud music.
So today I decided to experiment more with making gelatin-based glues. In December, I successfully made glue using gummy worms and bears. Then I made some nice liquid hide glue using unflavored gelatin.
I want to develop some recipes that readers can follow and replicate. So today was all about careful measurements, calculations and carrying the gazinta.
Gummy Glue 2
When I made my first few batches, I threw some gummies in the glue pot and added water until the stuff looked like glue. That’s still a valid approach. But I wanted to see if I could create a recipe that was a little better thought out.
Gummy bears are basically gelatin and sugar, with some added colors, flavors and a little carnauba wax to keep them from sticking to each other in the package. Today I’m using a local brand of gummy, Albanese, which is made in Indiana. They are softer than your typical Haribo bear and smell a good deal more.
According to the packaging, the bears are about 44 percent sugar. That makes them about 56 percent other stuff – mostly gelatin. So a rough guess is that 100 grams of bears contain about 50 to 55 grams of gelatin. For simplicity, I’m saying that the bears are 50 percent gelatin.
So a typical hide glue recipe combines 75 grams of hide glue pearls and 3/4 cups (177ml) of water. So, I’m melting 150 grams of bears in 3/4 cups of water. (Useful fact, the Albanese bears are 5g each, so you can count out 30 bears instead of purchasing a drug-dealer scale that weighs in grams.)
I know some of you are concerned about the sugar (won’t bugs eat it?). I have been reading some academic papers that suggest that the sugar might actually make the glue stronger. But we will see.
The gummy glue is cooking now, and I hope to convince Megan’s students to use it on their sawbenches (or at least have a taste of it).
Death Grip Glue 2
When I made my first batch of gelatin glue, I measured out the gelatin using volume because the original recipe used volume. When I poured the water into the gelatin, the gelatin immediately soaked up all the water and left about 25 percent of the gelatin powder bone-dry. So I added more water (I don’t know how much).
When I cooked the glue, it came out watery. Too watery. It would run off joints like water. So I cooked it down until it was snot-like. Then it worked great.
My goal with this second batch of glue is to create a more reliable recipe. First I converted the hide glue recipe from volume to weight. Why? The gelatin is like fine sand. The hide glue pearls are like fine gravel. So there’s some air between the pearls.
When I weighed one cup of glue pearls, they equaled 150 grams. So I put 150 grams of gelatin in a clean glass jar and added 1-1/2 cups (355ml) of water.
Again, the gelatin soaked up all the water, leaving some dry stuff at the bottom. I decided to just leave it for now and see what it looks like tomorrow when I need to cook it.
More updates soon.
— Christopher Schwarz
I tried this experiment 10-15 years ago.
I used the unflavored gelatin in the little envelopes from the baking isle, it was a bit watery but I spread it on two pieces of one inch square by about five inches long cherry that was planed glass smooth.
I glued them criss crossed so only a one inch square was the glue recipient, I let it dry overnight and I could not break the joint apart with my bare hands, and when I hit it with a hammer the wood broke but not the glue joint.
Oh, before I forget: You’ll probably get better mixing if you stir gelatin into thewater rather than vice versa.
NOW you tell me.
Sorry; I didn’t put 2 and 2 together to get 5 until you mentioned still having the un-moistened material at the bottom.
Slowly add the gelatin while stiring
And always pour the acid into the water, not the water into the acid.
Going even farther offtopic: That advice works when making “egg cream” sodas too. Pouring seltzer into chocolate milk is MUCH less likely to foam over than pouring chocolate milk into seltzer.
Foaming over is the fun part!
Is that so the stuff that splashes up and gets all over your hand and lab bench is water, not acid? Does that mean when a gentleman pees standing up it’s water that’s splashing and not what the gentleman is eliminating? This is something I’ve wondered often but never bothered to research.
a chemistry professor’s opening lecture on the first day of class bemoaned the lack of attention among students. the professor then proceeded to explaine an experiment . “in this beaker is a sample of urine i collected during my morning routine. observe as i put my finger into the beaker and again as i put my finger into my mouth. every student in the class is required to do as i just did or receive an F for the semester.” every student recently came to the front and put their finger into the beaker and then into their mouth. finally, the professor said, “just as i said at the beginning, no one pays attention. i put my index finger into the beaker and my pinky into my mouth.”
Not being a chem major I’m not certain l’m remembering the reasons for acid-into-water correctly so I’ll leave that for someone to Google.
Re contents of a splash: look up Doc Edgerton’s “strobe lab” photos. Among the many moments captured/studied are some beautiful pics of things like a drop of milk falling into water, where the color difference makes the composition of the rebound immediately visible.
Adding acid to water or vice versa is exothermic – it gets hotter. So adding a little water to concentrated acid results in steam and boiling (and vaporized) concentrated acid going everywhere, including your lungs – not good. Adding a little acid to a lot of water generally results in warmer water not boiling or steaming – still a good idea to stir it any way – and you can keep adding the acid SLOWLY until its all in, stopping if there is any sign of vapor.
Thanks for the explanation. I always thought it had to do with splashing.
Thought I recalled that, but as a chemist I make a good programmer.
Love this silliness.
I assume you will be using blue gummies for the shop 😉
I used lots of gelatine in my work as a pastry chef (for mousses and desserts rather than gummies). The industry standard when hydrating powdered gelatine in cold water is to use five times the amount of gelatine by weight (so 100 grams cold water for 20 grams gelatine). That’s probably more water than strictly necessary, partly to accommodate different bloom strengths, but I guess mostly because the end product isn’t supposed to be as hard as possible. So if you want your gelatine powder to fully hydrate you probably want to use at least 3-3.5 times as much water as gelatine (so 450-500 g instead of 355).
Also, I’m not quite sure about your math when working out the composition of bears. I looked up the nutritional label for Albanese gummies: 22 g carbs for a 32 g serving (both complex carbs and simple sugars, coming from corn syrup and sugar) and 1 g protein. So they’re about 70% sugar, 27% water and 3% dry gelatine, give or take a couple of percentage points, unless I’m confused.
Back with a couple more numbers. I looked up Haribo gummies, which are about 7% protein and 77% carbs (46% sugars, 31% stuff that’s more than mono- and di-saccharides), so about 16% water. This fits with your description that they’re harder than Albanese’s.
It seems from a cursory search that dried food-grade gelatin powder has about 10-15% moisture (not unlike wood itself), so 3% protein in Albanese bears comes from about 3.5% gelatin powder, whereas Haribo should be about 8% gelatin powder.
I see that both compositions include pectin: that makes sense even in non-vegetarian candy, since it’s cheaper than gelatin and a good way to get a little snap in their texture (as opposed to starch-based gummies, which have more of a dull hardness to them).
I wonder if the horse gummy’s from Ikea would work.
Depends which gummies, IKEA does a lot of vegan gummies which use carageenan instead of gelatin which may make SOME sort of glue, but probably not anything like hide glue.
Could be interesting to have a vegetarian hide glue, though, if it did work.
There are people experimenting with soy protein isolate to do just that.
As it happens, the topic of vegetarian/vegan glues came up on Bench.Talk.101 this Thursday, and then veered off towards your recent Gummy Bear trials.
In other words: trending!!!
(Or not.)
is it too much to hope for a free-range, grass-fed, gluten-free version?
all animal based products are inherently gluten free, unless you are eating their by-products. cow pies harvested from wheat fields are not.
Sadly, I think bears, even Gummi bears, are omnivores.
If you can come up with a reasonable formula will the process be significantly less expensive (say 50%) than hide glue?
The gelatin glue is much cheaper if you make it yourself.
Maybe you could get Bean to donate some urea…voila “Old Black and Blue” glue.
Those air spaces between the pearls are called interstices. I’m always happy to use the fancy words I learned a hundred years ago in school! Now off to boil some gummies!
As an aside — the gummy bears with the “A” on their belly are from the Albanese Candy Factory, which is located in Merrillville, IN. It’s a fun tour if you’re ever in the Northwest Indiana region, and you can buy 5 lb bags of their “Gummy Goof-Ups” for cheap.
yet another reason for saving wide-mouthed jam jars. I’d like to hear more about the effect of sugar on animal protein adhesion
In all seriousness, I’d suggest contacting the USDA Forest Products Laboratory in Madison, WI, concerning your ideas and research. They are deep into research and testing of all things having to do with lumber, including failure testing and analysis of natural and engineered products, which includes adhesives. They also have videos at this site showing how lumber products are designed and tested, neat stuff. Oh, they have a tree/wood identification service, too.
https://www.fpl.fs.usda.gov/
Never heard of them….
Purdue does this type of work in their Forest Products Lab as well.
If I recall, they may also work in conjunction with the Univ. of WI Madison. Maybe?
As a chemist, one of the things we learned reasonably early on, if you wanted to increase the accuracy of what you were making (often tied to making analytical reagents), you weighed the volume of liquid. The reason was you could easily get more significant figures out of it this way as compared to a volume.
When I was in grad school in the early to mid-90s, we worked all hours which meant the lab doors were open all hours. As such, the digital analytical balances were somewhat frequently stolen from the labs. We all assumed it had to do with weighing illegal drugs. As such, your comment is not inaccurate.
If you really want to control your gelatin approach you should also consider the bloom strength of the gelatin. You have been assuming that gelatin is gelatin, but it isn’t so. Gelatin varies with the strength of the gel it forms, and I would guess that could matter for glue properties. This gel strength is measured as the “bloom” strength of the gelatin and according to the Wikipedia entry can range from 50 to 325. I’ve seen gelatin for sale with bloom values from 120 to 250.
I was leaning toward ‘convinced’ until you cited Wikipedia. 😉 Alas, we live in an age where progressing to the third page of Google search results passes for scholarly research.
So you mentioned snot like. Do you mean booger like or on the tissue type. ( asking for a friend )
Love the Delirium glass with the Belgian ale. I have one for Christmas and the elephants are wearing Santa hats.