InsaneJournal

FF7 Materia Ice

Before the descent of a giant flaming hunk of interstellar ice and grit notably soured the population of Midgar on big chunks of ice in general, not to mention increasing the difficulty of finding the power to make random quantities of ice by an order of magnitude, there was a bar-ahem-"cocktail lounge" under the Plate called Maison d'Écureuil. They mostly served Soldiers during the troops' off-hours, but every once in a while small random street rats would find their way in one way or another and make big shiny eyes at the bartender on account of how that stuff looked awfully like materia and materia was the best thing in the world especially when rounded up and returned to one's own pockets as was only proper.

So the bartender nodded and patted the street rats on the head and made some materia-ice just-like-the-Soldiers only not quite just like the Soldiers on account of how he didn't want to explain how a twelve year old ended up dead of massive alcohol poisoning in his bar.

He took a particular pride in carrying flavors to match the full line of materia, and one of the things that kept the Soldiers coming back was a long-running range of bets on what exactly went into each of the materia-ice types. You could only order by color, after all, and it was the luck of the draw which precise flavor you'd get within that color range. So one time your 'magic' materia ice might taste of lime, and another time of kiwis, and another of tea, and you wouldn't know for sure what you'd ended up with until you'd equipped it onto your spoon.

The betting pool eventually settled down into a list of the flavors you might run into at Maison d'Écureuil:

So, like we were saying, ice used to be really cheap and easy to make before they got a megaton or so of it dropped on their heads, so quite a few people had gotten the notion of hmm, maybe this is a good gig here, and before anybody quite knew what was going on, there were materia-ice sellers wandering the streets with carts holding a couple dozen bottles of syrup and some scavenged engine hooked up to a compressor on one end and a sharp bit of steel and a chute on the other. And several of them even managed to survive Meteorfall on account of being eminently portable and not plugged into the central power system.

After that, it was a matter of time until it migrated back into bars and cafes, because bars and cafes could stock a wider range of flavors than a cart that had to be portable by definition, and someone got the bright idea of trying to bootleg-er-I-mean-'leave homage to' the Maison d'Écureuil materia ices.

1. Assembling your own bootleg-I-mean-homage factory:

Collect up a shaved ice device (far left) and whatever alcohol and flavor mixings you can lay hands on...

• Milk products - sweetened condensed milk comes in a tube in Wutai for this purpose; vanilla yogurt can also get pressed into service
• Any flavored liquid that will freeze - soda, tea, Kool-aid, etc; if you get the flavor into the ice before you shred it, so much the tastier
• Food flavorings and colors (Yuffie was bitterly disappointed to learn of the existence of nonalcoholic rum and brandy extracts)
• Not-yet-frozen freezer popsicles
• Alcohol minis
• Coffee/cocoa-flavoring syrups (Monin, Torani, etc)
• Daiquiri/tequila mixes
• Anything the crazy folks in Wutai might use to flavor mochi (green tea, mugwort, soy flour, purple yam...)
• Simple syrup to make it all hang together

1

If you have a choice of hand-cranked snow shavers or powered snow shavers? Unless you have a Soldier hanging out in your spare room, go for the powered version. It took your humble bootlegger about 15 minutes to crank enough for three samples, but I only got to eat one on account of how the first two tries at molding the ice had melted by the time I had enough to fill the mold. But it was really light and fluffy...

2

More of the assorted flavoring candidates.

3

Easiest way to make shaved ice flavoring ever! But that wouldn't have made for much of a write-up, so I decided to make some from scratch too, starting with the simple syrup...

4

Ordinarily simple syrup is one to one sugar to water, which is what I started with. (I used half a cup of each.) Bring it to a boil while stirring - it'll still look white because of the bubbling, but once you take it off the heat it'll settle down clear and nicely pourable. But you may want to do it two to one sugar to water in order to have less water pouring over delicate shaved ice and promptly destroying the structure you've spent all that time grinding away to make, as shown further below...

5

Gotta have one of each color available, after all.

Red: 2 Tbsp strawberry daiquiri mix, 1/2 Tbsp rum (proportions shamelessly copied from the mix)

Yellow: 2 Tbsp cooled simple syrup, 1/2 tsp lemon flavoring

Green: 2 Tbsp cooled simple syrup, 1/2 tsp matcha powder (there's a pattern forming here...)

Blue: 1 Tbsp cooled simple syrup, 1 Tbsp milk, 2-3 drops coconut flavor, 3 violet pastilles, a toothpick-dip of food coloring

Purple: 2 Tbsp cooled simple syrup, 1 tsp alcohol, toothpick-dips of food coloring

6.

This was after I'd given up on actually molding the ice because it disintegrated when I tried to pack it into a mold and then unmold it; mashing it roughly into shape with a spoon came up with something nice and fluffy...

7

...and the addition of one of the flavors promptly disintegrated at least half of it. (Hence the 'freeze it into your ice if you can' recommendation. Note the completely-undissolved violet pastilles too, sheesh.) But it was really tasty.

Self, says I, there's no way in heck anyone not gifted with Soldier muscles can make a business out of this when cranking all that by hand. So, off to the mechanical solutions! Step one was the mini food processor, to which I added crushed ice to give it a bit of a head start. It looked promising:

8

...but didn't turn out as promising as it looked.

9

Quite a bit tastier than it looked, but not very attractive or salable. Stupid flaming hunk of space debris going and taking out a person's well-tuned shaved-ice machine which would otherwise have been quite scavengable if not for the giant hunk of building dropped across it...

The next attempt would have involved a blender, since blenders are quite common bar equipment and usually intended for turning ice into slush of some thickness or other, except that I have yet to steal loot "acquire" a working blender from anywhere in the wreckage. Ah well.

If you'll excuse me, I've got some more buildings to ransack. There may not be Soldiers around any more, but there are still Turks, and Turks and alcoholic substances are a match made in an enterprising businessman's dreams... so long as one has acquired some really high-end collateral damage insurance, that is.

ETA ETA: Look what raisedbymoogles did! Fanfic!

And stopthatgirl7 has another scoop: Puppyverse!

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