Italian Sodas are the HARDEST THINGS TO FIND!

by Shaggy

Actually, they aren't that hard to find.

But assembling the parts necessary has been a huge to-do over the past month.

For those of you who don't know, an Italian soda is basically soda and syrup.

Commonly sold at coffee shops (as you'll often see those large colourful syrup bottles against the wall behind the counter), you take a squirt or two of the flavour (strawberry, etc), fill the rest with club soda (or sometimes sparkling water), add ice, and maybe add some table cream or whipped cream (though in my experience, the club soda makes it curdle pretty quick like an Irish car bomb...Guinness and Bailey's)

The problem has been trying to assemble all the necessary parts of making an Italian soda.

To set the scene, I live in Toronto's Little Italy, which you would THINK is prime place to buy an authentic Italian soda...NOT SO.

I spent a night running into different restaurants, coffee shops. bistros and bakeries asking if they sold it, and all of them gave me canned or bottled sodas like Orangina or San Pellegrino.

One place misheard me and thought I asked for "ahepple soydah" (apple cider with a Boston accent), to which my suspicions should have been raised when she grabbed a packed of apple cider and started pouring hot water into it (damned if I didn't know there wasn't a hot winter version of the drink)

Finally, in exploring the St. Laurence Market down at Front and Jarvis, I walked into a tea/coffee store, that actually sold the large bottles of Torani flavoring syrups.
YES! FINALLY! Half a month into my new interest in soda making, and now I got the key ingredient to make my own.

And I must say, it's been pretty swell. I'm not a huge fan of most mainstream cola/soda/pops, like Coke and 7-up (root beer and more fruit flavoured stuff are my vices), but this home-assembled strawberry Italian soda has been going down pretty smooth.

Only problem is, I either use too much or too little syrup. To solve this, it was suggested I get one of those plastic pumps like they have at the Starbucks for their flavour shot bottles.
Hey, how hard could it be to buy one of them, I work near a school that specializes in the culinary arts. Can't be too hard to find in a kitchen/restaurant supply shop.

...

...plastic syrup-bottle pumps are the HARDEST THINGS TO FIND!