Category: Syrups

Chinese Golden Syrup

Chinese golden syrup is something of an odd duck in the syrup world. It’s an invert caramel syrup that flows at room temperature, even when undiluted with milk or water. That’s a very odd thing, since in order to get sugar syrup to caramelize you have to heat it well past the point at which it will flow once it cools. So how is this accomplished? Simply put, what you see here is a syrup made on top of a syrup, a dark caramel syrup for color and flavor, and a soft-ball stage syrup for flow. I’ll show you how it’s done.

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Glucose Syrup

“Glucose syrup” is what some in the English-speaking world call corn syrup. Indeed this incredibly thick and sticky stuff is corn syrup, just a rather special kind. In what way? It’s exceedingly low in moisture, which makes it handy for all sorts of confectionery work where you want to keep the finished product flexible without adding extra water to it. It also has a much cleaner taste than grocery store corn syrup because it has fewer of the thickening long-chain starch molecules in it (it’s thick because it’s almost entirely, well…glucose).

Rarely does a baker use glucose syrup, save in caramels and fondants. The fascinating thing about it is that despite being nearly 100% glucose it doesn’t taste very sweet compared to conventional syrups, even though it’s made of the simplest of sugars and the general rule is that the simpler the sugar, the sweeter it tastes to humans. It does of course have every bit as many calories. Even more really, since most syrups are about 20% water. Just one of the quirks of the way our taste buds work. Curious indeed.

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Invert Sugar Syrup

I’ve referenced invert sugar quite a bit over the last week. But did you know that you can actually buy it in a jar? You can. I did. Then I took a picture. This is nothing more than a plain ol’ everyday sucrose syrup that’s been heated and treated with an acid (tartaric or citric, probably). You can make this yourself of course, but some bakeries and/or confectioners would just as soon buy it pre-made. Who am I to argue?

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Honey

Nature’s most skilled and experienced syrup makers are the bees. They’ve been making syrup out of plant nectar for millions of years. The process they use is the same one we employ for making syrup out of tree sap or cane juice: reduction. They start with a thin 80-20 water-to-sugar solution that they extract from flowers, then slowly reduce it until it has a moisture content right around 18%. At that point they deposit the syrup in a cell in the honey comb, cap it off with wax and await the winter (or the beekeeper).

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Maple Syrup

Human beings around the world have harvested sweet tree saps for eons. Most of us in the Northern Hemisphere automatically think “maple” when we consider tree syrups, but in reality there are many other types of sap-giving trees. Birch trees, for example, which Alaskans and Scandinavians have long tapped for their sweet nectar. Hickory and elm trees also contain sap, though it’s less sweet and delivered in smaller quantities, so it takes more time and work to collect it and reduce it down to a syrup.

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Sorghum

Sorghum syrup is, generally speaking, something you only see in households in the upper Midwest. Sorghum, like sugar cane or wheat, is a grass. It produces heads the size of corn ears that contain small seeds, about the size of millet. Farmers once grew sorghum for cattle feed. The grain itself is nutritious, and the stalks can be stored and fermented into silage, i.e. edible compost that cows can live on during the winter.

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Malt Syrup

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.

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Refiner’s (a.k.a. “Golden”) Syrup

Refiner’s syrup (also called “golden syrup”) is made, as the name implies, at a sugar refinery, not at the sugar mill which is where molasses is produced. It’s a by product of the making of white sugar, the final “molasses” that’s produced when white sugar is centrifuged. It contains mainly sucrose and water when it’s first spun out, but is treated with acid (or sometimes the enzyme invertase) to create a proportion of invert sugar. For more on sugar refining, see my (now integrated) primer on sugar making.

Refiner’s syrup can make a fine alternative to either molasses or corn syrup depending on the application, though since it tastes every bit as sweet as table sugar you need to be careful about overloading your recipe with sweetness.

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Molasses

Molasses as you know is a by-product of the sugar making process. It can be made from either cane or beets, though beet molasses isn’t used much here in States (Europeans do use it some, however). As was mentioned in the sugar posts from last week, sugar is made by adding “seed” crystals to a volume of long-cooked, drastically reduced cane juice. The mixture forms crystals and the whole mess is then spun in a centrifuge (basically a big basket lined with cloth) and the thick liquid molasses is pulled out via centrifugal force.

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