Search Results for: molasses

Excellent question, reader Josh! Toffee sauce is similar to caramel sauce in the sense that it’s made from sugar, butter and/or cream, the main difference is the degree to which it’s cooked. Toffee is only cooked to the point that the sugar in it melts, at which point it becomes usable. Caramel is cooked well […]

Reader Iñigo writes to ask when it was that Americans stopped drinking rum and started drinking corn whiskey instead. That’s a great question and one I’m not totally sure I can answer. For the fact is that Americans never completely stopped drinking rum. Certainly they drank a lot less of it after the American Revolution, as that war largely ended a once vibrant trade between New England and the Caribbean, whereby the Colonies supplied plantation owners with necessities like building materials and food for slaves and in return got sugar and especially molasses for rum-making. Boston was once the rum distilling capital of North America, don’t you know!

So ask readers Mari and Lisa. I live for this sort of stuff, so let’s get into it. First, let’s define a few terms. Corm syrup is something most of us are very familiar with. It’s a syrup made from corn endosperm (starch) that has been exposed to enzymes which break the long chain starch molecules down into short sugars that human tongues can taste. The result of all this molecule-breaking (hydrolysis) is a soup of roughly 15% glucose (one of the very simplest of sugars), 10% maltose (two glucose molecules bonded together) and 55% longer sugars. These longer sugars blunt the sweetness of corn syrup simply because we don’t have taste receptors for all of them. They also give it thickness. The last 20% is water.

I didn’t make any malts this past week, but even so reader Loni wants to know what “malt” is and why we eat it. It’s a great question since not only is malt rather unusual as ingredients go, it occurs in several forms in the baker’s kitchen.

I should start by observing that malt isn’t so much a thing as it is a process. “Malting” is a word that means the same thing as “sprouting”, or perhaps more precisely, “germinating”. It happens when a seed, notably a grain like barley, is exposed to water and a temperature of around 65 degrees Fahrenheit. The seed, which is composed of an embryo (the germ) and a food supply (the endosperm) breaks open so the embryo can grow. The embryo sends out a shoot and enzymes in the endosperm switch on and begin slicing the long-chain starch molecules stored there into simple sugars. Why?

When I’m quiet it generally means one of two things: I’m traveling or I’m having trouble with a recipe. Shoo-fly pie has turned out to be one of those problem children that I didn’t expect. It’s a really weird concoction, basically a thin mixture of water and molasses with some flour and soda stirred in. The idea is that the combination of the bubbles (from the soda) and gelatinizing flour thickens the filling during baking and the result is pie. I’ve mostly achieved that, the problem being that the filling so thin at the outset that it penetrates the crust before it can thicken, creating a sticky film that’s not only unappetizing to look at, it sticks the pie to the pan. So I’m chasing down some old recipes, the ones that have neither any added sugar or extra fat, which only seem to exacerbate the problem. I’m headed back to Amish country, in other words. See you back here shortly!