It can take just 90 seconds and a rubber band.

Curious cooks have begun hacking carbonators, the soda-making machines that are proliferating in American home kitchens. Most buyers are happy to use them for their intended purpose: turning tap water into sparkling water. But off-label, they have been used to make herb-infused sparkling wine, newfangled sangria, heady cocktails and nonalcoholic — but intoxicatingly delicious — sodas.

Recently, in a storefront laboratory in Chinatown, Piper Kristensen, a bartender and occasional lab assistant who works for the avant-garde bar Booker and Dax in the East Village, studied a SodaStream Penguin. It had arrived fitted with a new feature, a device that was preventing him from carbonating the clear tomato juice he had purified in a centrifuge. He probed the carbonator’s dispensing valve, figured out that its plastic collar had to be raised, and twisted on a rubber band. In short order, he poured a fizzy cocktail of tomato juice, vodka and sugar into elegant cordial glasses.

He handed one to his boss, Dave Arnold, formerly the director of culinary technology at the International Culinary Center as well as an owner of Booker and Dax. Mr. Arnold sipped. “It tastes like ketchup soda,” he said. “Maybe you should go back to the egg cream.” Mr. Kristensen is on a quest to produce a carbonated egg cream, but as it turns out, it is difficult to carbonate milk. (Its proteins cause excessive foaming.) But as he showed, it is extremely easy to carbonate many other liquids, to delicious effect.