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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.

So far, New York City's few remaining seltzer-delivery men are safe. But the home brew looks poised to take over the market.

Americans bought more than 1.2 million home carbonators, like the SodaStream and the SodaSparkle, in 2012 alone. In April, Samsung is to roll out its first line of refrigerators with built-in sparkling water dispensers. Last week, SodaStream — the Israel-based industry leader, which began sales in the United States in 2009 — reported that annual sales worldwide rose to $436.3 million in 2012, from $289 million in 2011. According to Yonah Lloyd, president of SodaStream International, the company sold about 3.5 million machines last year. Because of its nimble approach to manufacturing, SodaStream landed on Fast Company magazine's "World's 50 Most Innovative Companies" list for 2013, alongside Apple and Google. (The company has also attracted unwanted attention, including a boycott, because some of its plants are in the West Bank.)

Home carbonators have been on the market before, but the machines were bulky, and maintaining a supply of food-grade carbon dioxide was complicated. (The new lines offer trade-ins at retailers, or online ordering for fresh CO₂ chargers.) And now, with many consumers worried about discarded plastic bottles, the machines have a strong new selling point. Homemade seltzer is space-saving, inexpensive and environmentally friendly; one plastic bottle can last a year or more. The gorilla-size carbon footprint generated by shipping bottles of sparkling water from, say, San Pellegrino Terme in northern Italy to San Jose in Northern California is eliminated.

Manufacturers like SodaStream and SodaSparkle also have a profitable sideline in flavored and sweetened syrups, mostly artificial, to be mixed with bubbly water into approximations of name-brand sodas.

But the health costs of drinking soda are becoming hard to ignore. And premium beverages with extra fruit juice, like Mash or Spindrift, can cost up to $4 a bottle. "Real ingredients come at a price," said Bruce Cost, the creator of Fresh Ginger, Ginger Ale, an unfiltered brew of grated ginger root, cane sugar and water. (Popular ginger ales like the ones made by Schweppes and Canada Dry contain no fresh ginger.) All this explains why so many people are taking their soda machines off-road. With a little practice, it's possible to make inexpensive, relatively healthy, brightly flavored sodas in a sweet spectrum of fruit, using ingredients, like fresh lemon, that are rarely used in bottled drinks. (Its acidity is too short-lived.)

The first line of experimentation for home cooks is dabbling in syrups to mix with the sparkling water. The variety of all-natural, small-batch flavors on the market, like Morris Kitchen's Preserved Lemon and P & H's grapefruit, is astounding, and makes lovely soda.

Yet it seems the spirit of innovation cannot be held back. Owners of carbonators start to look at juice containers and bar shelves with a speculative eye, making the leap from adding syrup after the fact to carbonating other mixtures entirely.

"At first I was just putting in half apple juice and half water," said Sara Williams, a mother of three in Boulder, Colo., who owns two SodaStream machines: one for water and one for everything else. "Then I started throwing in cherry juice, and grape, and we went a little nuts."

Some home carbonators are able to handle this, or any kind of liquid. Many others carry manufacturers' warnings against using anything but water, and caution that the warranty is immediately voided if even a squeeze of lemon or a drop of apple juice is allowed to enter the sacred bottle. Depending on their design, the machines can create a tremendous mess if used with alcoholic or sweet drinks; some would-be hackers report traumas like ceilings covered with margarita mix, or a fine mist of red wine sprayed around a 400-square-foot kitchen. But the home machines have built-in release valves and relatively weak pressurizers, so any real damage is usually limited to the machine.

"If you put other things through that system, there's no way it won't eventually gunk up the works," said Mr. Lloyd, of SodaStream.

Carbonation has long been one of the tools in the molecular-minded chef's kit: tasting something that's normally flat, like sorbet, and finding it fizzy upends expectations and provides an extra sensation on the tongue. Professional-grade equipment like the ISI siphon can be strong enough to carbonate fruit, chocolate, sorbet and even sugar, creating tongue-crackling, Pop Rocks-like effects.

Carbonation also carries aromas quickly to the nose and has a flavor of its own, a mild acidity that contributes to the refreshing quality of sparkling drinks. Star bartenders like Craig Schoettler in Chicago and Jeffrey Morgenthaler in Portland, Ore., have experimented with carbonating full-strength cocktails like the Americano and the Corpse Reviver. Without the usual slug of club soda to make them fizz, the drinks are very flavorful, very refreshing and very intoxicating.

But the carbonation process can yield other benefits. "Forget the fizz, forget the buzz; the flavor possibilities are incredible," said Gregory Brainin, director of culinary development for the Jean-Georges restaurant group. Mr. Brainin has been experimenting with a home carbonator for years, using it to instantly extract flavor compounds from herbs, spices, chiles and citrus. Instead of steeping chiles for months in vodka, or soaking oranges in red wine until they are mushy to make sangria, he has found that the pressure of a CO₂ charger can effect a flavor transfer more or less instantly.

"The pressure created in the bottle forces water into the aromatics," he said. "And that pushes their flavors out into the liquid." In 30 seconds, using a $28 hand-held carbonator, he infused white wine with basil and mint leaves, and then fizzed red wine with orange and pineapple, creating an instant sparkling sangria in which the fruit was still crunchy and bright.

Finally, he infused vodka with the fruity heat of a Scotch bonnet chile, and the resulting lemon-chile cocktail tingled with effervescence, sweetness and heat.

H. Alexander Talbot, one-half of the team behind the Ideas in Food blog, noticed that his daughter loved carbonated juice once the family acquired a Perlini machine, and set out to make a fizzy rum punch without the rum. He added brown sugar syrup and charred wood chips to the bottle to add the smoky flavor notes of aged rum, plus passion fruit juice, pineapple juice, cherry juice and water. All-juice mixtures can be too thick and pulpy to carbonate, Mr. Arnold said. Strained juice, mixed with water, often produces the best results.

Mr. Arnold has done extensive research into the gastronomic applications of bubbles (not to be confused with the ubiquitous foams, which are produced with nitrous oxide). He said that for successful and controlled carbonation, it's important to have cold liquid, plenty of kitchen towels and patience.

At first, add a small amount of liquid to the machine at a time. And after charging, wait until the foamy head has subsided, then slowly and gradually remove the bottle, as if opening a shaken-up bottle of soda. "You're taking the liquid from a pressurized to a nonpressurized situation," he said, covering a bottle overflowing with a just-fizzed cocktail of Campari and gin. "It just wants to expand."