The Homemade Brown Rice Syrup Blues, Part 2

I tried making another batch of brown rice syrup last night, changing up a few things. The result? Another jar of mud.

It was not a total failure. The fact that I got eight ounces this time, rather than two, means that homemade brown rice syrup will be economical when all is said and done. By rough calculations I figured that this eight ounce jar cost me $1.21 to make (not counting labor and electricity). So a full sized jar (16 ounces) would cost $2.42. I still haven't been successful at converting all of the starches so when I do, the yield will go up even more and the cost will come down.

Even though this turned out muddier than the last one, it is sweeter and less bitter. The reason it's muddier is because I ground the rice into flour and so some of the unconverted starches were small enough to slip through during the straining process.

Here's what I did this time. I ground a cup and a half of rice into flour with my coffee grinder, then cooked it in nine cups of water for about twenty minutes. I let it cool until the temperature in the center of the pot was below 150 degrees Fahrenheit. Then I added the sprouted barley.

This time I also did something different with the barley. On various websites that talk about how to malt barley, they say that once the barley is sprouted it's dried in order to halt the process at the right point. I haven't been doing this, since I was using the barley immediately and didn't think it mattered. But this time I dried the barley in the oven for several hours (keeping the temp below 150F at all times). Whether this is a critical step or not, I don't know. But it did have one obvious benefit--when it was dried I could grind it into a fine powder in the coffee grinder. That made it possible to disperse it more uniformly in the rice mixture.

So I mixed the barley powder ( 1/4 of a cup) into the rice mixture and put it in the oven, where I kept the temperature somewhere in between 140 and 150 degrees. I let it cook for seven hours then turned the oven off and left it there overnight. (The only reason I didn't cook it longer is because I was heading to bed). In the morning I strained it. This time instead of using cheesecloth I strained twice through my regular mesh sieve and twice more through a really fine sieve (one of my little two-inch diameter tea strainers--a little tedious!). Still, some of the starches were fine enough to get through. This yielded six cups of liquid, which seemed like a promising amount to start out with. From that I was hoping to yield at least twelve ounces of syrup.

It took about forty-five minutes to boil it down and in the end, as I said, I got eight ounces. It's the sweetest batch so far and also the least bitter, so I know I'm on the right track. I really think the bitterness is coming from the unconverted starches rather than the barley. There still was quite a lot of rice sludge that I filtered out--at least a cup, maybe a cup and a half.

So, next time... (while I was working on this last night my friend John called and I told him there wasn't going to be a next time, but he launched into the "What if Thomas Edison had given up after a few tries, what if Albert Einstein had given up after a few tries" spiel. I told him it's not quite the same--this thing has already been invented. There's really no need for anyone to do it again. But, sigh, I am quite a persistent little bugger so I will probably keep at it until I figure it out.) Anyway, I was saying, next time I'm going to up the amount of barley maybe to as much as half a cup and I will also let it cook indefinitely. The worst thing that will happen if it goes too long is that the sugars will start to convert to alcohol. If I keep tasting it as I go, I should be able to tell when that starts to happen. Then I'll know for the next time to stop just short of that.

The Homemade Brown Rice Syrup Blues, Part 1

A few years ago I decided to try to figure out how to make brown rice syrup. I didn't find a whole lot of information to go on, but I went with what little information I had and did some experimenting. The result was a syrup of the right consistency but muddy looking (kind of like beef gravy) rather than translucent. Worse than that, while it had a degree of sweetness to it, it also had an unbearably bitter aftertaste. So bad that when I finished the experiment I never wanted to see brown rice syrup again nor even a single grain of brown rice. Bleck!

The problem was probably one of three things: either some of the starches hadn't converted to sugar, or I used too much barley which itself may have been bitter, or I let the barley sprout for too long and that caused it to be bitter.

These seem to be the three most important variables: how long to sprout the barley, how much barley to use, and how long to heat the mixture in order to get all the starches to convert.

The basic process, I believe, is this. You sprout some barley. The sprouting process releases enzymes in the barley, which is what will digest the starches in the rice, turning them into sugars. You cook the rice, then cool it to a temperature below which the enzymes won't be destroyed. (I've seen conflicting information on just what that temperature is, but 140 degrees Fahrenheit works.) Once cooled you add the sprouted barley (crushed, or chopped in a food processor) and then let the enzymes go to work. You have to keep the mixture heated to the 140 degree range the whole time (the oven on its lowest setting is the best bet for me) and it will take many hours. Once you've let it digest long enough strain off the liquid through several layers of cheesecloth and boil the resulting liquid down to the desired consistency.

The first time I experimented I tried to control for the amount of barley used. I divided the cooked rice into four different containers. At that point I didn't know whether I should leave the barley whole or chop it up. I thought chopping might help, but I also worried that it might damage the enzymes somehow (shows how clueless I was). So in one bowl I put a tablespoon of whole barley, in another bowl a tablespoon of chopped barley, in a third bowl I put a quarter cup of whole barley and in a fourth bowl I put a quarter cup of chopped barley. Within five minutes, the two bowls with the chopped barley were bubbly, just like when you proof yeast, so I knew that chopping the barley was beneficial. The other bowls followed along shortly thereafter, but at a slower pace. As the enzymes continued their work, the mixtures began to thin considerably. I could tell that the starches were breaking down. The bowl with a quarter cup of chopped barley did the best, so it would seem that more barley is better (sounds logical). However, I don't know if the barley is contributing to the bitter taste, so it might be the case that more is not actually better. It might be faster, but not better.

This week I decided to take another stab at it. Since the last time I experimented I'd come across a recipe in a 1975 issue of Mother Earth News magazine for what they called "Grain Honey" . It sounded similar to everything I'd tried and so I hoped that they had all the kinks ironed out for me, as to amounts and timing and all of that. The only thing I did differently was to use four tablespoons of sprouted barley instead of three. That was because my sprouts were only two days old and I was afraid they wouldn't be potent enough. So after hours of baking, then boiling it all down, I had another syrup of the perfect consistency. It was not quite translucent but at least it didn't look like beef gravy this time. I took a lick. Definitely far sweeter than the last batch...getting close...but wait, ugh, there it was again--that horrendous aftertaste!

So, it's back to the drawing board. Did that one extra tablespoon of barley ruin it? Or did the starches not completely convert? It's frustrating with all these variables to manipulate--the ratio of rice to barley, the time you let the barley sprout, and how long to let the rice cook.

I suspect there's another variable. When I experimented the first time, I chopped my rice in a coffee grinder and made it into a flour of sorts. I figured that the finer it was, the more effectively the enzymes could go to work on it. The Grain Honey recipe leaves the rice whole. So using the Grain Honey recipe, when the rice was done cooking with the barley I had rice in a watery fluid. I put that all in a cheesecloth-lined strainer and squeezed the liquid through. But afterwards I thought, if there are still rice kernels left behind, aren't those kernels still unconverted starches? And as I squeezed, wasn't I maybe squeezing out starch as well as sugar?

It seems that ideally you'd want to convert it all. Using the Grain Honey recipe I ended up with only about 2 fluid ounces of brown rice syrup. If that's all you get, then it would be totally uneconomical to make this at home. The store-bought stuff is cheaper. Yet, I was left with a massive glob of sticky rice. There has to be a way to get it all to convert.

So, it's back to the drawing board yet again. This time I think I'll try the Mother Earth News recipe again, but I'll grind the rice before I cook it, and let it cook much longer.

There are some other possible variables that I'll look into after I try this, but if this works then Hooray! I'll let you know.

[See my follow-up post The Homemade Brown Rice Syrup Blues, Part 2.]