What Do You Do with Mountain Dew?

Food writing for gamers.

Like most adults who were once children, I have a complicated relationship with Mountain Dew.

My Dad loved Mountain Dew, so we almost always had a case in the fridge. I’d wait for him to leave the house, then crack open a can with gusto, slurping down that first mouthful of icy foam like the head on a beer. The color was poisonous—the unnatural green of a cartoon dinosaur. Sometimes, I’d pour Mountain Dew into a glass and hold it up to the light just to watch it fluoresce.

But even as a kid, I couldn’t drink more than a few ounces before my head started to spin. Mountain Dew’s maximalist sweetness felt too simple, too available. I had already learned to temper my enthusiasm for what adults called “empty calories.” I didn’t trust things that were easy to love.

Mountain Dew is built around the immediate bioavailability of sugar and adrenaline. It is ostensibly a lemon-lime soda, but the taste isn’t really the point; ads rarely even attempt to describe it. When I was in high school, PepsiCo started releasing new varieties of Mountain Dew promising flavors that were neither edible nor, in some cases, corporeal. They had names like “VOLTAGE” and “SUPERNOVA” and “TYPHOON.” Every time you opened a can, you heard the distant strains of Ted Nugent’s guitar.

I’ve long been fascinated with Mountain Dew the Brand. I can think of no other soda so clearly associated with its target demographic: gamers, dirtbikers, and teenagers who hate their parents. Over the years, Mountain Dew has repeatedly resurrected an ad campaign proclaiming its beverage “GAME FUEL.” They sponsor BMX tournaments, video game conferences, superhero movies. They have a logo that looks great on a half-pipe: abbreviated, vowel-shy, lettered in what I can only call “chaos case”: Mtn DeW.

The Mountain Dew ethos is a barbed wire tattoo inked in 2021, a flame decal on a Honda Civic. It doesn’t care if you think it’s tacky; it’s riding a sugar rush straight to hell, and it’s doing it in wraparound sunglasses.

I admire and fear the lifestyle in equal measure—even if I’m Dewbious about the soda itself.

Mountain Don’t

So what do you do with Mountain Dew? I set out to find a use for it that wasn’t ironic or deliberately unsettling. I was determined to treat the beverage with the Dew-gnity that it Dew-serves.

The Dew-garita was an obvious first choice: Red Lobster paved the way in 2020 by filling a martini glass with antifreeze. It claimed the drink “pair[ed] perfectly with Red Lobster’s iconic Cheddar Bay Biscuits®” which to me is a bit like saying a stapler pairs well with sex: I mean, sure, I guess I can use it, but I’d really prefer it wasn’t there.

The problem with the Red Lobster version was that it didn’t really try to be a margarita at all. Besides the tequila, the only other ingredients were Sour Apple Pucker and a short pour of ‘Dew.

I have since addressed these shortcomings.

DEW-garita 2: 2 Sweet, 2 Spurious

1 1/2 ounces reposado tequila
Dash orange bitters
3/4 ounce freshly squeezed lime juice
3 ounces Mountain Dew

2 tablespoons each granulated sugar and citric acid (for the TYPHOON RIM)

Combine the sugar and citric acid and spread the mixture on a plate. Wet the rim of the glass and press into the mixture until it adheres.

Fill the glass with ice, add the remaining ingredients, and stir vigorously for about 30 seconds.

Typically, I use Cointreau in my home margs, but I decided to leave it out in favor of orange bitters, which add some of the same aromas without the extra sweetness.

Look, I’m going to level with you: I still think this drink would be better without the Mountain Dew. The fresh lime juice kept it quaffable, but between the color and the corn syrup, it was almost indistinguishable from a shitty bottle-mix marg. I wouldn’t recommend making it unless you’re locked inside a hotel room with competitive Starcraft players.

I needed a more compelling justification for bringing Dew-liter bottles into my home. So I turned where I usually turn when I have an Unpleasant Fluid to burn: cake.

I should note here that “Mountain Dew cake” is a preexisting confection in that Paula Deen once used it as a “hack” to improve boxed cake mix. But I scrolled through page after page of Google results, and couldn’t find a recipe that used Mountain Dew in a scratch cake. So I set out to adapt my favorite lemon layer cake for the DEWmocracy™.

The frosting required a little more thought. In the end, I went with an Italian meringue buttercream so I could incorporate a Mountain Dew syrup (Italian meringue is more amenable to liquid sugars than Swiss).

I reduced four cups of Mountain Dew in a saucier for about half an hour until I had a little over a cup of concentrated, piss-colored syrup. I whipped that into a meringue, plopped in enough butter to choke a horse, and added in lemon zest and food coloring at the end for that certain je ne sais jaune numero cinq.

The result was very sweet and vaguely citrus-y. In other words, it tasted exactly like Mountain Dew.

Green Mountain Gâteau

For the cake:
2 cups plus two tablespoons all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
3/4 teaspoon kosher salt
1 1/2 cups granulated sugar
10 tablespoons unsalted butter, softened to room temperature
3 eggs
1 cup Mountain Dew
2 tablespoons lemon juice
Zest of one lemon

Step 1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Line the bottoms of two 8-inch round cake pans with parchment paper and then lightly coat the sides with cooking spray.

Step 2. Sift flour, baking powder, baking soda, and salt together in one bowl.

Step 3. In a second bowl, beat sugar and butter together until the color lightens and the mixture is fluffy (about 5 minutes). Add eggs one at a time and beat well after each one. With the mixer still running (or your tired hand still stirring), slowly add the flour mixture and Mountain Dew, alternating between wet and dry. Add lemon juice and lemon zest and stir until incorporated

Step 4. Pour batter into prepared pans (I like to weigh the pans on a kitchen scale so that the layers are identical). Bake at 350 for half an hour or until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean. Cool in pans on a wire rack for about 10 minutes, then un-pan the cakes, unstick the parchment paper from their backsides, and let them cool completely on the wire rack on their own before frosting.

For the Italian meringue buttercream [adapted from Stella Parks]:
4 cups Mountain Dew
5 egg whites (weighing about 170g total)
1/4 teaspoon kosher salt (if you only have table salt, use less)
1 1/2 cups unsalted butter, softened to about 65 degrees Fahrenheit
Zest one lemon
Yellow and green food coloring (optional)

Step 1. Boil Mountain Dew in a sauce pan for about 30 minutes or until you have a little over a cup of concentrated syrup. At this point, use a candy or instant-read thermometer to temp the syrup. You need it to hit between 240 and 250 degrees Fahrenheit before adding it to the egg whites, so adjust the heat as needed and take its temperature frequently to monitor progress.

Step 2. While the syrup is simmering, whip your egg whites on medium-high until thick and glossy (“soft peaks” are fine—you’ll whip it more shortly, so you don’t have to worry about the texture yet).

Step 3. As soon as the Dew syrup hits anywhere within the temperature window (240 to 250 degrees F), remove it from the heat and, with the mixer running, slowly drizzle the syrup down the side of the bowl into the egg whites. Please do not scald yourself with hot sugar syrup: drizzling down the side of the bowl rather than directly on top of the mixture will help avoid splattering.

Step 4. Continue whipping the meringue until it’s thick and glossy. Then take its temperature—the meringue is a little high-maintenance, and you need it to cool down to between 85 and 90 degrees Fahrenheit before adding the butter. If it’s too hot, keep whipping until it’s in that window. YMMV, but this should take between 4 and 5 minutes on medium-high.

Step 5. Add the salt, followed by the butter in roughly 2-tablespoon chunks, waiting only a few seconds before you add the next chunk. As the butter is added, the meringue will lose a lot of its volume. Do not panic. This is all part of God’s plan.

Step 6. When all the butter has been added, reduce speed to medium-low and add lemon zest and food coloring to desired alien intensity. Then, shut off the mixer, scrape down the sides of the bowl with a spatula, and whip on medium-high for a few seconds more just to get everything incorporated. If your frosting looks curdled, soupy, or greasy, don’t panic and don’t throw it out. Meringue can be brought back from the point of absolute ruin; miracles are possible. Consult Stella’s troubleshooting guide here. I rarely get my meringue right on the first try and almost always have to pop it in the fridge for a few minutes and whip it again. Keep the faith.

Step 7. Frost the cake. If you have any leftover frosting, it’ll keep in the fridge for a week—just thaw to room temperature and whip it again before you use it.

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