Bringing food chemistry to life

My job as a cereal scientist sometimes affords me the joy of a full day of baking, product development, and promotion of our work and the farmers who are putting their money where their mouth is and growing food barley.

In all the products shown below, the flour has a minimum of 10% stone-ground whole barley. The long loaves and the pretzels have 50% wholegrain barley flour and the big sandwich loaves have 50% barley with 35% stone-ground whole-wheat. The remainder is plain baker’s flour.

This was for our successful  “Barley and Friends” field day. {link} held this May 9th.

And good practice for our event at the “Kneading Conference West” in September {link}.

The barley pretzels are, of course, the natural accompaniment to that other barley product, good beer!

Thanks to Jake Mattson of the Oregon State Food Science department for helping to divide, shape, and dip [in 1M NaOH] the 100 pretzels we made!

I’ve been having a work “vacation” – working with Craig Ponsford at the “Ponsford’s Place”  Innovation Center [link] to fine-tune our barley bread formulations.

We uncovered some interesting processing challenges that point to the particle size of the barley flour as being a suspect.

We played with the water because barley has so much great soluble fiber as mixed linkage beta 1-3, 1-4 glucans that it soaks up water like a sponge. These breads had 50% by flour weight whole-milled barley flour and respectively left to right 90% or 100% [flour basis] water. 100% water on this basis is equal weights of flour and water, and still it made bread.

Oregon State University’s “Streaker” hull-less barley going into the mill.

What barley foods can do for you…

They can keep you satisfied with outstanding flavor as well as keep you healthy and regular, as our whole-grain experiments in fine food here at Oregon State University are showing us.

Sourdough barley boules: 50% of the flour is barley in the style of a light rye via Michel Suas’ “Advanced Bread and Pastry”

Barley baguettes made with a yeasted biga – again 50% of the flour is wholegrain barley and of that 10 to 25% [depending on the day] is our own “Wintwax” winter-habit hulled waxy variety. The rest is our beautiful mutli-colored hull-less winter food barley, also milled as a whole-grain on our stone-mills. Both varieties were bred here at Oregon State University by the denizens of Oregon State University’s BARLEYWORLD. The lack of AMYLOSE in the waxy barley flour gives an outstanding softness and moistness to the crumb. Too much though leaves the bread too soft to support itself: we need that retrograded amylose network. Too much waxy starch also reduces the flavor formation in the crust: clearly messing with the water activity too.

Off to make a “Willamette Valley Sourdough Barley” the autolyse is ready to mix.

Poolish barley baguettes soon as well as great 100 % whole-grain breads made from wheat varieties bred and grown in Oregon by the Oregon State University wheat breeding team, the hard red winter wheat Norwest553 primarily,  and of course wholegrain barley bread by the Oregon State University barley breeding team.

Harboes Brewery in Denmark has released a ‘fresh tasting lager” that does not use malt !

They say…

“Harboe introducerer den revolutionerende Clim8Beer – en moderne brygget pilsner, som sparer miljøet for mere end 8% CO2 pr. øl men med samme gode smag”.

“Clim8Beer is nothing less than a revolution, a fresh lager brewed in a modern way, saving the environment for more than 8g CO2 per unit. Still, with the same great taste of course”.

Instead of malt Harboes are using an enzyme preparation (Ondea® Pro) from Novozymes to replace the malt. I am guessing alpha- and beta-amylases (to get the maltose from the starch), maybe amylogucosidase and/or pullulanase (to make sure there is a maximum of fermentable sugar and not too many small maltodextrins with alpha 1-6 bonds), maybe some proteases to mimic the mild proteolysis that should be active in barley malt so that the proteins/peptides after mashing are at the appropriate stage of hydrolysis, and of course some betaglucanase for the mixed linkage beta -glucans that are the cause of stuck mashes.

Harboes has called the beer clim8, www.clim8beer.dk, as they claim a reduction in the carbon footprint from the sidestepping of malting. I guess malting does use quite a bit of energy and water. A lot of the energy must be used in the kilning of the malt.

There are english language videos like this one http://www.clim8beer.dk/english/tilblivelsen_af_clim8.html that describe the process.

Novozymes take on the new beer is here http://www.novozymes.com/en/MainStructure/PressAndPublications/PressRelease/2009/BarleyBeer.htm.

Novozymes claim that it is a “sustainable revolution in brewing” , but of course it still needs to taste good !!! I am interested to taste my first sample.

Is this a good or bad thing – is it the end of the malthouse (I personally doubt it, especially for darker beers that rely on more extensively kilned malt). Just how do they replace the flavors created by kilning? Even in a mild beer using a pale malt there must be some products of Maillard that lead to the toasty, nutty, roasted flavors.

Beating the teapot effect

Oregon’s Agricultural Progress articles…

Articles about our wheat and barley breeding activities.

Kernel Chemistry – wheat

Barley world