Cooking Crack Without Baking Soda
Dec 13, 2012 Anyway, I screamed, showed Jeremy all my appendages to calm him down and then exclaimed, “I have no baking soda.” What Can I Substitute for Baking Soda? After talking to my mom (a master in the kitchen who now answers “Kitchen Hotline!” when I call her phone) I had the solution.
This is an excerpted chapter from How to Be a Motherfucking Pimp which, for the time being, is free from this link as PDF. The book is updated and includes more information on making crack than what is presented here. How to make meth and PCP are also included. However, it needs to be stated that nothing either here or in the book is meant to be implemented in anyway. It is for entertainment purposes only.
If Biggie Smalls can give you the Ten Crack Commandments, I can one-up that. Besides, he’s dead. These are the ten ordered steps on how to make crack. There are other ways in which you can do it, but this book is meant to be primarily about pimping, not the production of crack.[6] Nevertheless, Dazzle Razzle is going to throw you a bone, so here’s a primer.[7]
1. Get your coke.[8] The better the coke, the better the crack. However, the better the coke, the better you just put it up your nose.[9] Use mid-quality coke for crack. It is better. It is the impurities in the coke that you actually hear popping or crackling when you smoke it and likely give it its namesake. The other way to make a coke freebase is to use ether or ammonia,[10] but this will give you a purer form of cocaine hydrochloride. Careful with the ether, it is both volatile and flammable.[11] Either way, what you are doing is freeing the cocaine alkaloid from the hydrochloride so that it is smokable, but let’s stick to crack as our freebase.[12]
2. Measure out a 4:1 or even 3:1 ratio of coke to baking soda.[13] It depends on the quality of your coke and the desired quality of your product.
3.Put this shit into a beaker and add just enough distilled water to cover the mixture. Make sure you don’t overdo it or your crack won’t harden properly.[14] Now swirl this around until it is a solution.
4. Cook. for me the best way to do this is to take a cotton ball soaked in rubbing alcohol. This is a long lasting, efficient burner that achieves a stable temperature. Put this in a stainless-steel mixing bowl and ignite. The beauty of this method is that you aren’t relying on much. You could be cooking crack in a forest or the back of a bus. You needn’t to be at home and you need little by way of apparatus.
5. Hold the beaker with the solution over the flame. Wait for it to boil. Don’t let it overcook. You will lose valuable crack vapors and, when it reaches around 90 °C, it will burn.[15]
6. Once it boils, remove it from the flame. Do this over again a couple times. What you will notice are ‘crack bubbles’ in a now viscous solution.
7. Add some more distilled water 6 or 7mm above the crack bubbles. Continue to heat, although you do not need for it to come to a boil. Keep swirling the beaker.
8.You will see an oily yellow amassment. This is the good shit. Keep swirling and it will begin to solidify. What you have achieved is this, Coc-H+Cl− + NaHCO3 → Coc + H2O + CO2 + NaCl.
9. Now you’re going to collect the precipitate. You can let it cool and collect the rocks, or you can extract it with a sterile metal object such as a knife. Introducing the object will allow for the crack to gather, climb and solidify. Chop it up accordingly.[16]
10. Now you’ve got crack-cocaine. Resist the urge to smoke it, but if you do, enjoy.[17] Should cross the blood-brain barrier in about six seconds. If you like, you can effectively reverse the process by diluting it with something acidic like vinegar. Now you can’t smoke it, but you can inject it. Maybe even into your face. I use malt vinegar so that I can feel the burn.[18] Mix that shit with heroine and you’ve got speedballs.[19] Now you just need to find a non-collapsed vein and it will get to the brain almost instantaneously. Hurray![20]
Babbbbabby[21]
Addendum
Remember, the substance is less volatile than the customer on the consumption end. It’s easy to make crack. So much so that you know your customers are suckers. That is not to say that the product is bad, just that your customers are predictable in an unpredictable way. The best customer is the one that functions as a middleman. They might try to jack you, but, when they’re not, the volumes are bigger, the transactions fewer and more meaningful. Everyone is happier. Also, you don’t have to deal with any crackheads. Having said that, if you have the energy and patience, you’ll make more money if you divvy up your crack and sell it to the fiends. Do it almost by the rock if you can.
Now you don’t have to make crack to sell crack. Making crack is also a good way of assaying the quality of your blow, especially if you’re uncertain about the chain of distribution above you. If you’re selling coke, you can just make a small batch of crack. By the sizes of the bubbles you can tell the purity. Bigger bubbles equal better. Little bubbles mean that there are a lot of impurities. Keep selling a better product and you’ll be having keys coming from overseas.[22] Straight from source is when you become a magnate.[23] Now, that’s the coke Game, and that’s where the money is, but don’t knock crack. Smoke that motherfucking shit.[24]
For real, but as Too $hort said, the crack epidemic was the black man’s lost chance. Just like the white man made a fortune during Prohibition, so too should have the black man in the 80s and 90s with crack.[25] Draconian legislation saw the black man held down and the opportunity lost. [26] Extended sentences and all manner of unpleasant shit.[27] That’s why the pimp Game is where it’s at,[28] but that will be got to in good time.
For the full, Free book, click this How to Be a Motherfucking Pimp.
If you like us or hate us, leave us a review on Goodreads
If you need more convincing to read this free shit, check out a straight up chapter on how to pimp HERE
Click HERE for the main menu
Pimpnotes
[5] Not the crack, the money. [*Editorial note* pimpnotes 1-4 refer to shit in the actual book. Check it out.]
[6] But, as the commercial went, If I could buy the world a Coke.
[7] As O.T. Genasis said, “baking soda. I got baking soda. Whip it through the glass, NIGGA.”
[8] As SL Smooth said, “The main ingredient, ya’ll.”
[9] As Leonard Cohen said, “And everybody knows that you live forever. Ah, when you’ve done a line or two.”
[10] On a terminological note, freebase as a noun means the pure form of an anime. Freebasing the verb is when you smoke this shit. The distinction should be maintained.
[11] The real word here is inflammable. However, as Strunk pointed out many-a-year ago, one should use flammable when concerned about the safety of children and illiterates. Either may be the case here.
[12] As Melle Mel said, “Higher, baby. Get higher, baby. Get higher, baby. And don’t ever come down. Freebase!”
[13] Doesn’t have to be baking soda, but could be ammonium bicarbonate or ammonium carbonate, doesn’t really matter. Either way, the wisdom of the ages is on your side in terms of ratios. Agamemnon, Ganymede, etc., etc. would do the same with wine to water. All these niggas went 3:1, except for maybe Dionysus who’d probably go 1:0. That’s gangsta. But, “Christ follows Dionysus,/ Phallic and ambrosial.” J.C. went 0:1 to get 100% wine, but he’s the man. Crack is all J.C. because they’re both hella dope.
[14] It’s gotta rock. As Necro said, “crack is my violin.”
[15] As C-Murder said, “Overcook yo’ dope it might come out brown. Them fiends gonna run yo ass clean outta town.”
[16] You can skip all this and make fake crack. As Krayzie Bone said, “We would make fake rocks of crack from bread. We’d ball-up the bread, put it in the oven, let it get hard, chop it up, and put Orajel on it. As soon as you drop it in the buyer’s hand, and he gives you the money, it’s sold. If they want the money back, well, you’ve got to handle that.”
[17] As Josh Todd said, “And, yes, I’m all lit up again.”
[18] Like Beethoven putting his head on the piano.
[19] As Lou Reed said, “Heroin. It’s my life and it’s my wife.”
[20] You can even inject it into your cock like Mother Superior.
[21] Public advisory, but fuck it. A million magic crystals, painted pure and white. A multi-million dollars almost overnight.
[22] Just so there’s a 2Pac reference in something that began by evoking Biggie. If only we could invoke them.
[23] Or the don dada, if you prefer.
[24] The sage advice of Charlie Sheen should be evoked here, “”I said stay away from the crack. Which I think is good advice. Unless you can manage it socially. Because, if you can manage it socially, go for it, but not a lot of people can, you know.”
[25] The cocaine market was already saturated. But, if coke could be sold to a new demographic and at a fraction of the cost with a high profit line, why not? The CIA definitely turned a blind eye to some of what the Contras were moving. Some of that shit was even flown in on military planes. Still, an entrepreneurial effort was required. This is where you saw the likes of Freeway Rick Ross getting the product to the streets.
[26] Targeting that fickle demographic of crack addicts, PCP might just be another crack at it.
[27] As Killer Mike said, “But thanks to Reaganomics, prisons turned to profits ‘cause free labor is the cornerstone of US economics ‘cause slavery was abolished, unless you are in prison. You think I am bullshitting, then read the 13th Amendment. Involuntary servitude and slavery it prohibits. That’s why they giving drug offenders time in double digits.”
[28] After all, that’s why drug dealers are the pimp’s lesser brethren.
If baking soda were a woman, she would make the perfect 1950s housewife – she cooks, she cleans, she gets rid of smells and excessive gas, she soothes bug bites and sunburned skin.
But any man who thinks he can keep her in the kitchen to take care of the home had better watch out: The long-suffering baking soda wife who has had enough of her no-good domineering husband also has, in her nature, the ability do him serious harm!
The bloke is well advised to sharpen up for a bubbly coupling with his missus.
Baking soda is often billed as a wonder product. You’ll find “51 fantastic uses for baking soda”, “10 quick ways to improve your life with baking soda”, “11 amazing health benefits for using baking soda”, “Surprising uses for baking soda that have nothing to do with baking” and similar listicles all over the Internet.
In terms of household cleaning and personal health, NaHCO3, aka sodium bicarbonate or bicarbonate of soda, is quite the workhorse. You’ll get through half-kilo bagfuls quite easily and will replenish often.
In cooking, however, a little baking soda goes a long way. So, it’s important to get the balance right – too much will result in a soapy or bitter taste, and in baked goods, a coarse, open crumb.
The good people at SeriousEats, the online authority on all things food, have several articles on the fascinating chemistry of baking soda.
They’ve done tests on exactly how much baking soda to use to make gingersnap cookies with the best snap and flavour, and how to turn ordinary spaghetti into springy ramen noodles.
It can be used to neutralise excess acidity in canned tomatoes, tenderise dried beans, produce crisper shrimp, and it helps cut down the time you need to spend at the stove watching your onions caramelise.
The reddish-brown colour of devil’s food cake is caused by the reaction between baking soda and cocoa powder. Photo: Pixabay
Baking soda, an alkali, when combined with an acidic ingredient – such as vinegar, citrus juice and buttermilk, but also items like chocolate, brown sugar and honey – reacts to release carbon dioxide gas. This causes doughs to rise and batters to expand, as well as gives that reddish-brown colour to devil’s food cake.
The baked good that is probably best associated with baking soda is soda bread. It is often identified with the Irish, but according to the Society for the Preservation of Irish Soda Bread, it wasn’t invented in Ireland. The American Indians are said to have used pearl-ash or potash, a natural soda in wood ashes, as a leaven in their breads.
As for the Irish, they use baking soda instead of yeast in their breads as the wheat that can grow in Ireland’s climate is a “soft” variety, which produces low-protein flour and doesn’t form gluten like traditional bread.
The recipe for the spiced bread here was inspired by one made by Nadiya Hussain, arguably the most famous winner of The Great British Bake Off so far, on a TV show she later hosted. It contained five spices and she served it with a lentil curry. Star2 also recently featured a restaurant that serves a curry leaf-studded soda bread that was reminiscent of vadai.
Yeast doesn’t play well with large amounts of spices (some kill it), so a soda bread is the perfect conveyor for this curry-inspired loaf.
Among our recipes, you can see the chemistry of baking soda at work most distinctly in the honeycomb toffee – which also goes by, among other names, hokey pokey, foam candy and cinder toffee.
But baking soda isn’t essential only as an ingredient inside baked goods. Before they are baked, pretzels are poached in a baking soda solution, and this is what gives them their brown, shiny crust (the Maillard reaction at work) and their distinctive flavour.
One of our recipes here is for pretzel bites. They’re little lengths of dough so no need to faff about with the traditional knot, which sometimes comes undone in the boiling poaching liquid.
Have some dhal curry with this savoury soda bread.
SPICED POT SODA BREAD
You can replace buttermilk with soured milk: For every 250ml of full-cream milk, add 1 tablespoon of white vinegar or lemon juice and let set for 5 minutes. The loaf can also be baked on a baking tray. Keep an eye on it as it may brown faster. Use any mix of spices you like, such as cumin, coriander, fennel and cardamon.
250g all-purpose flour
½ tsp salt
½ tsp bicarbonate of soda
1 tbsp mixed curry spices
large pinch of turmeric powder
200ml buttermilk
Before starting on the dough, place a large Dutch oven or lidded stainless steel pot in a 230°C oven to heat up.
Sift flour, salt and bicarbonate of soda into a large bowl. Stir in spices and turmeric powder.
Make a well in the centre and pour in three-quarters of the buttermilk. Bring the ingredients together. If there are still dry bits in the bowl, add a little more buttermilk. Once a soft rough ball forms, turn out onto a lightly floured surface.
Flatten the dough gently and fold it over itself. Repeat this for 10 seconds to form a smooth ball.
Carefully take the hot pot out of the oven, take off the lid and dust the bottom of the inside with flour. Carefully drop the ball of dough into the pot and using a sharp knife, cut a large cross into the top of the loaf.
Replace the lid of the pot and return to the oven.
Bake the loaf for about 25 minutes, then take off the lid and bake for another 10 minutes until the top is brown.
When cooked, the bottom of the loaf should sound hollow when tapped. Best eaten warm.
Cook Cocaine Into Crack Without Baking Soda
Crushed honeycomb toffee makes a crunchy ice cream topping.
HONEYCOMB TOFFEE
You need a large pot for this as the sugar mixture foams up once the baking soda is added to it.
Use a pot with a light coloured interior surface, such as stainless steel, as it makes it easier to tell the colour of the caramelising sugar.
The use of a candy thermometer is recommended.
200g caster sugar
60ml golden syrup
2 tbsp water
½ tbsp baking soda, sifted
Garnish
melted chocolate
sea salt
Line the base and sides of a 20cm square tin with greaseproof paper. Place sugar, golden syrup and water into a large heavy pot (see headnote above).
Over medium heat, bring the mixture to the boil, stirring occasionally. Continue boiling until the sugar reaches the hard ball stage (150°C). Immediately remove from the heat and sprinkle in the baking soda. Whisk the soda in gently but quickly.
The mixture will foam up and you don’t want it to deflate. Pour it into the prepared tin. Set aside for 1-2 hours to harden.
Lift the toffee out of the tin using the paper. Crack the toffee into shards with the handle of a wooden spoon or if you want more even pieces, use a serrated knife to saw through it.
If preferred, dip one end of each piece into melted chocolate and sprinkle with sea salt.
Store in an air-tight tin at room temperature.
PRETZEL BITES
Cook Cocaine Without Baking Soda
250g bread flour
¾ tsp instant yeast
¾ tsp fine salt
1 tbsp brown sugar
125ml warm water
¼ cup baking soda
1 egg, beaten
Sour cream-mustard powder (optional)
1 tbsp nutritional yeast, crushed into a powder
1 tbsp powdered mustard
½ tbsp powdered milk
salt, to taste
Honey-mustard dip (combined)
¼ cup mayonnaise
2 tbsp English mustard
1 tbsp grain mustard
2 tbsp Dijon mustard
1-2 tbsp honey
salt, to taste
Place the flour, yeast, salt, sugar and almost all the water in a bowl. Mix together, adding more water if needed, to form a firm and tacky dough. Cover and set aside for 10 minutes.
Fold the dough onto itself several times for 10 seconds (yes, seconds – that’s the beauty of the folding method). Cover and leave for 10 minutes. Repeat this folding process 2 more times at 10-minute intervals. Cover and set aside until doubled in size.
Transfer the dough to a lightly floured surface; divide into 4 equal pieces. Roll each piece into 2cm-thick rope, and cut out 4cm-long lengths. Place on a greased baking tray, cover and proof, 30 minutes.
Preheat the oven at 210°C. Bring 5 cups of water to the boil in a large pot. Add the baking soda; the water will vigorously bubble. Gently drop in the pieces in batches and poach for 20 seconds. Remove with a slotted spoon and return to the tray.
Brush the tops with egg wash. With kitchen scissors, make 2 parallel snips on the top. Bake until deep brown and crisp, 15 minutes.
In a mixing bowl, combine all the ingredients for the sour cream-mustard powder. While the pretzel bites are still hot, toss them in the powder. Serve with the honey-mustard dip.