The Chinese have been making malt syrup for thousands of years. In fact up until the mass adoption of cane sugar, it rivaled honey for its popularity. The technique is pretty neat. It involves the “malting” — which is to say “sprouting” — of barley grain in pans of water. Once the seeds have germinated, the sprouts are dried and ground up to make a powder.
What’s the point of this? Simply that sprouted grain is rife with starch-digesting enzymes. It’s those enzymes that are responsible for disassembling the starch in the seed, which is the fuel that the sprout needs to grow. However those enzymes can be hijacked and put to other purposes…like breaking down rice or wheat starch. And that’s exactly what the Chinese did with it, creating sugar solutions out of mashed grain and malt powder that they’d boil down to thick syrups.
Malt syrup is similar to other sugar syrups in that it contains lots of glucose, maltose and other longer-chain sugars. It isn’t used all that much anymore, though bakers use it to spike their bread doughs with both sugar and enzymes.
I love this syrup series. I’ve never come across malt syrup – but I do love the taste of malt.
You’d find it interesting, then. It’s not something you’d make a pie out of, but it can be useful especially as I said in bread, bagel and pretzel making. The sugar and enzymes speed up browning.
- Joe
Is malt syrup similar to malt extract? My husband and I use malt extract to brew beer (rather than malting whole grains), and it looks very similar to your picture.
Great question, Jacki!
Malt extract is an all-barley (no rice or wheat) syrup, and as such it’s both stronger-tasting and denser in enzymes. It’s like malt syrup on steroids!
- Joe
You sure can brew with this stuff! It works great for a mixed method, where you brew with both malt extract and whole grains, since a lot of malt syrups (at least the ones I buy from health food shops) still have all of their enzymes intact.
I’ve had great results with it.
I have used wheat malt in several dishes (you can but it by the quart through brew supply places) and also in a spent grain bread I make with the barley/wheat leftovers when I brew. Mostly its just a trick to make a whole dinner around brewing for my own entertainment. The stuff is not very sweet so its not exactly like honey but it does have an interesting flavor profile
Its been a couple of years since I have done that but I could dig up my notes if anyone cares.
You have an interesting culinary sensibility, Frankly!
Thanks!
- Joe
GREAT post Joe! It’s a very familiar syrup to us but I don’t think many of us know how it’s made! As kids, we would use a chopstick to ‘dig out’ some maltose syrup and sandwich it between two saltine crackers – a treat! It’s also an essential ingredient in making roast duck or goose. After blaching the skin with boiling water several times, the bird is brushed with a solution of vinegar and maltose syrup. I guess the thicker consistency of maltose syrup ‘holds on’ to the skin better than other sweeteners and contributes to crispiness and caramelisation during the roasting.
Wonderful story, Henry!
I did know that it’s an important ingredient in Pekin duck, where it works like a thick glaze, as you say.
Thanks for the terrific comment!
- Joe
Maltose syrup is also an essential ingredient in making Cantonese-style roast pork (char siu). After roasting, the pork is plunged into a light maltose syrup (mixed with some water of course, since it’s so thick) to give it a glossy sheen, viscosity, and sweetness. Here’re are my attempts haha:
http://sphotos-b.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ash3/545816_10151224769248352_285309787_n.jpg
http://sphotos-b.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ash4/485653_10151227091943352_893716075_n.jpg
I chopped up some of the char siu meat as the filling for the buns in the second pic.
Good stuff for brewing beer with, especially if you’re doing it from a kit!
I am loving this series too. I’ve got some jaggery ordered now. It just look so yummy!
Thanks Joe
My pleasure, Erin! And let me know what you think!
- Joe
I never attributed malt to the Chinese! The more you know
I was surprised by that too. Sadly they didn’t lead the charge in beer brewing.
I am so enjoying this series. I hope you have sorghum syrup lined up for us. My father loves it, especially on biscuits.
I’ve used malt extract and syrup for beer brewing as well as bread baking (but I’d rather drink it han eat it). For bread baking I’ve been using malt powder — dehydrated malt syrup/extract. I assume that the syrup is about 80% water so I use about 20% of the powder in the bread dough. The powder keeps forever. I was having mold issues with storing syrup/extract.
So what’s the difference between diastatic and non diastatic malts?
Hey GL!
Diastatic malt has active enzymes in it. The enzymes in non-diastatic malt have been deactivated with heat.
- Joe
So…
1. Why use non diastatic malt instead of sugar?
2. When would you want to use diastatic malt and how is the result different from just sugar?
Hey again GL!
I’m not totally sure I understand your question but I’ll try to answer them anyway.
Diastatic malt is usually sold in powdered form as a so-called “dough improver”. It’s not really sweet to the tongue, even though it contains a lot of sugars, many of them don’t taste sweet to our tongues. The enzymes it contains go to work on starch in bread dough, cutting it down into sugars yeast can use. In that way it really is similar to sugar, except that the enzymatic activity helps to brown bread crusts in a way that sugar doesn’t.
Does that answer your question?
- Joe