Looking into a digital heating bowl to go along with the KA stand mixer, for extended, stirred mixing at controlled temps (for starch conversion, for example). There are dedicated mixers like Kenwood's Cooking Chef series that I've seen that are just out of my league cost-wise (if I spend this amount, it will likely be a spiral mixer).
Anyone use this mixing bowl add-on with their KA mixers and if so, how do they work? Do they maintain target temp well?
IMHO DDT is not particularly relevant to small batch bakers. To commercial bakers with 20+kg batches, DDT is important due to the thermal mass of 20+ kg of dough. At .5 to 2 or 3 kg masses, ambient environment takes over much more quickly than in a commercial setting. My instinct is in the KISS camp. Let’s not gild the lily. Let’s make bread and consume it.
Cheers,
Phil
Hi Phil -
Thanks, and I hear you but this isn't for DDT actually. It's to maintain a starter of one build or another for various fermentation or other developmental stages - e.g., saccharification range with malt over the course of time. For the "Rheinisches Schwarzbrot" by Lutz Geißler, for example, he has his "Malzstück" maintained at 65C and stirred over 4 hours, which is a pretty classic saccharification stage (he has enzymatic malt in this stage, along with rye meal and water), though I can't for the life of me figure out why one would need that length of time, much less stirred that long (traditional brew mashes are static, and conversion takes place much more rapidly).
Having tried a thermophilic and otherwise incredibly complicated process on another (Baltic) bread, I swore I'd never do it again jury-rigged with water baths and Inkbird controllers - so this mod to the KA seems within range, if it in fact works.
Thanks for the post,
Paul
Paul,
if you plan to rely a lot on warm and hot preferments necessary in rye baking, you might as well invest $10-20 in a heating pad (choose one WITHOUT auto shut off feature) or about twice as much in a Japanese rice wine maker that could be set to 20-65C for up to 48 hours. It looks like yogurt maker and could be used to make yogurt, of course, as well.
A friend of mine uses this one, she bakes rye breads similar to the one that you want to make (with the saccharification step of the scalded rye - Malzstück) in New York.
Saccharification at 62C requires only 2 hours. No stirring is necessary. However, absolutely the same result could be obtained at room temperature, it would simply take a little more time. Let's say, overnight and then store it refrigerated until needed. No special equipment is necessary.
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Thanks Mariana. I actually use germination mats controlled by the Inkbird controllers but just didn't think they'd be enough to get and keep temps up into saccharification range (I've only used them up to about 92F. They work beautifully at this range). Hadn't thought of the heating pad, thanks.
Rice wine maker....?! I've made sake, and jury-rigged the critical stages from koji-making from seed (koji-kin), ("Seikiku") through the mashing stages ("moromi", broken up in builds much like dough builds) through to finished sake via pressing and filtration. Used a standard nested bamboo wok steaming setup to gelatinize the volumes of rice needed and the standard rice cooker controlled by Inkbird once again for the seed formation.
Are you talking a rice cooker?
As you know, I've done thermophilics and mash conversions a good deal, but the thermophilic cheese "mothers" were less cumbersome to do in the water bath. Hated the last thermo make, using the water bath method. I'm curious about your friend's setup - what an actual "rice wine maker" does.
I agree with you on the 2 hour mash time. I'd expect 80-85% within the first hour with conversion efficiency dropping off the second hour, but 2 hours is safe (things like water/grist ratio, diastatic power, pH having their effects). And no need for a stirrer, though it does increase efficiency (most modern breweries of any size have mash rakes that also aid at mash-out). So thanks for the confirmation.
Expensive and unnecessary toy.
I wonder if the germination pads I have can get me to 65C and holding. Once stabilized (with time), they stay within a very tight margin of +/- 1 deg F. Otherwise, the heating pad seems great as I know they can get quite hot.
Edit: Missed that you provided links, sorry. Ha! Never knew the Amazake makers were so cheap. Pretty cool. Not my thing (prefer sake to Amazake) but nice to know.
Thank again!
Mariana,
Please tell me more about saccharification at room temperature.
Can I simply add a bit of diastatic malt to my usual oat soaker and leave it at room temperature overnight and get the same result as heating, cooling to 62C, adding the malt and holding it there for hours?
Overnight would fit my schedule perfectly...
Thanks, Gary
Yes Gary, of course you can. It does not matter how we get from point A to point B, quickly, at the maximum speed (@62C), or slowly at room temperature. The process is the same. Once all starch is digested by the enzymes, it will stop naturally.
You can always check its completion by the iodine test, or just taste the scald to see if your scald already tastes sweet and became semi transparent and glossy, syrupy ( initially, it looks like dull, opaque, thick porrige).
Wait a minute! You do not want to heat the oats at all? No scalding at all? You have to burst the starch granules of the grain open, though, for the enzymes to get in... It takes heat. In microwave, it takes seconds to bring it to 60C, then add diastatic malt or a tsp of whole grain flour (as a source of enzymes) and leave it at room temp.
Without heating the soak first, the intact starch granules will be attacked by the enzymes only on the surface, looking like so. Barely scratching the surface, so to speak.
It is better to burst them open by heat, to make them into gel first. Then you will fully convert all starches into sugars.
Thanks! Just what I needed.
I have to say, amylase enzymes are essentially not active at room temperature, particularly the alpha amylase which breaks long starch molecules into pieces. I doubt that if you add malt to a room temperature mash of some kind, it would do much of anything overnight, maybe the beta amylase will chop off some sugars from the ends, but it'll be very slow. At least start at around 63-65 and just try to slow down the cooling...
Ilya, at 65C both cereal amylases are already more than a little inactivated. Which is good for us, or else all breads would be impossibly sticky and liquid inside due to baking them for 30-60min or longer.
The reason for that temperature is gelatinization of starch. In two to three hours at 62-65C all starch in the scald would be fully gelatinized, no individual starch granules would be left.
In the nature, enzymes are "adjusted" (or selected) to the optimal environment of the organism. Saliva amylases work at our body temperatures best. Wheat and rye (or oat) amylases work well at themperatures at which those plants germinate and starch is converted into sugars for the needs of the growing embryo.
Wheat can germinate in soil temperatures from 40 F to 99 F (4-37C), for example, but temperatures from 54 F to 77 F (12-25C) are considered optimal. All starch would be fully hydrolyzed at such temp!
Alpha amylase works very well at room temperatures, be it inside of a batch of fermenting dough to supply sugar for yeast and lactic bacteria, or inside scalds... The rule of thumb is that its activity declines in half each ten degrees Celcius, but it will work even in the refrigerated scald, only very slowly.
Well... How long does it take to hydrolyze all starch in a plant embryo, and how much amylase does it have relative to a scald? I think it must take a while (days?), and the concentration is much higher (since germinated grain is essentially pure malt, not a little malt added to lots of flour).
However your mention of stability is something I haven't considered, and indeed, at higher temperatures it loses activity quite quickly. I wonder whether this is enough to compensate for the low activity over just one night incubation...
If given enough time, of course it'll eventually digest everything even in the fridge, but how long will it need? I just have a feeling it will be more than overnight... Have you tried it? I think the only way to know for sure is to try and see how long it takes.
https://www.cerealsgrains.org/publications/cc/backissues/1978/Documents/chem55_754.pdf here are some numbers for the barley alpha-amylase, for the curious people, by the way.
Super interesting discussion! I'm running an experiment with a small amount of oats.
Both batches are 20 grams of rolled oats + 50 grams of water. I boiled them in the microwave, then allowed them to cool to 150 and added 0.3 grams of diastatic malt. One batch is staying in the oven for 4 hours. The other batch is on the counter, cooling pretty rapidly; I'll leave it until tomorrow morning (or longer if you think I should).
I'm not sure what I'll be able to test at the end... Maybe I can compare the taste and appearance? Would the pH tell me anything? How else should I compare them?
I'd say taste is the main indicator (i.e. the sweeter the more broken down the starch). As mariana explained earlier, with flour the appearance and consistency changes a lot too, but I've never tried it with oats, so not sure how visible it would be. Probably also visible - more liquidy means more broken down. I think pH shouldn't tell you anything... But activity of the enzymes is also affected by pH somewhat, so could be interesting to see what it is, and whether and if so how different it is between the two for some reason. I expect they would be similar in pH.
And awesome that you are trying, looking forward to the results!
In my crude experiment, I can't tell the difference between the oats that were held at 62C and those that cooled at room temperature. They look comparably gooey with strings of goo stretching out when spooned. They taste comparably sweet to me. The pH is likely not of interest but it was about 6.2.
It would be interesting to repeat with wheat flour.
If I'm eyeballing it correctly, after 1 hour at 62C the amylase is maybe 15% active. It started at about 20000 and dropped to 3000 after one hour. Looking at 25C, I see about 8000 units of activity and nearly 100% stability.
If I pretend that the formula for the activity at 62C is 20000 * 0.15**T where T is the elapsed time in hours and then take the integral, at 1 hour I've got about 9000, at 2 hours about 10300, at 3 hours about 10500. I'm pretty sure I've read Mariana saying that the job is pretty much done at 2 hours which seems to match this.
If at 25C, I'm getting a steady 8000 units, it shouldn't take more than 1.5 hours to catch up...
So, my fake math says that if I cooked my mash, let it cool to 25C, then added the diastatic malt, I'd get pretty much the same result as holding it at 62C for 2 hours.
This seems optimistic to me. Maybe the answer is in figure 1?
I don't have one of those bowls, but I think I can suffice by using THIS. The bowl inside which must be used for everything anyway can be used for heating foods like sauces & frostings for cakes.
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Is THIS the bowl that y'all mean ?
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