Beyond Barley

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The New York Sun

It’s always fun to learn a new food-related word, and it’s even better when the word itself sounds fun. Here is precisely such a word: maltster. That’s what you call someone who’s in charge of malting grains. Go on, say it: maltster. Isn’t that great? When asked what you do for a living, wouldn’t you love to be able to reply, “I’m a maltster”?

But what is malt, anyway? It’s a term most of us encounter at a very young age, thanks to the classic Mother Goose nursery rhyme “The House That Jack Built” (“This is the rat / That ate the malt / That lay in the house that Jack built”). And it shows up in a wide variety of foodstuff names, from malt vinegar and single-malt Scotch to malted milkshakes and chocolate-covered malted milk balls. We’re all familiar with these products, and most of us also have some sense of what “malty” means — a rich, toasted flavor with a slightly pungent undercurrent. But most people don’t know what malt actually is, or why it makes so many things taste so good.

Penny Pickart does. She’s the Division Manager for Briess Malt & Ingredients Co., a 130-year-old Wisconsin firm that produces more than 50 different malt varieties for the brewing and food-service industries.”When you malt something, what you’re essentially doing is starting to grow the grain,” she said. “And most of the time, that grain is barley, because it has the right enzyme levels.”

Here’s the short version of how malting works, as explained by Ms. Pickart: After the harvested barley is delivered from the farm to the malthouse, moisture is added, which causes the barley to germinate and sprout. “During that process, there are many enzymes that are either being created or increased,” she said. The germination continues for four of five days, closely monitored by the maltster. At this stage the barley is called green malt, and looks a bit like bean sprouts. The germination is then halted by placing the grain into either a low-heat drying kiln (the kilns at Scottish distilleries are usually peat-fired, which gives Scotch its distinctive smokiness) or a high-heat roaster, depending on the desired flavor profile for the batch.

The dried malt is then ground and mixed with water to create a mash, called wort. The wort is heated, which causes the enzymes that were created in the germination process to convert the grain’s starches to sugars. When the conversion is complete, the spent grain is strained out from the wort, which is now sweet.

This, Ms. Pickart explained, is a key point in the process, because you now have several options. If you’re making beer, you’d add hops to the wort for flavor and then add brewer’s yeast, which would convert the wort’s sugar into alcohol and carbon dioxide; if you’re making Scotch, you’d skip the hops, add the yeast, and then distill the resulting beer-like product into whisky. If your whisky is distilled from only one kind of barley, rather than from a blend of several, then it’s a single-malt. But for food applications, the next step usually involves evaporation. For example, the wort can be dehydrated down to a thick, syrupy state. This is malt extract, which is what’s added to vinegar to make malt vinegar, and is also a key ingredient in most classic New York bagel recipes. And with more people becoming concerned about the potential adverse health effects of high-fructose corn syrup, malt extract is becoming increasingly attractive as a natural sweetener.

Another option is to add milk to the wort and then dry down the resulting mixture into a powder. This is malted milk powder, still available under the Carnation brand at most supermarkets. It’s usually stocked near the nondairy creamer or Ovaltine (which, coincidentally, began as a vitamin-fortified version of malt extract, and at one time was called Ovolmaltine).

Surprisingly enough, malted milk powder was conceived as an infant formula. Chicago pharmacist James Horlick and his brother William came up with the idea in 1873 (William patented it two years later), and their Horlicks malt powder soon became popular as an all-purpose nutritional supplement for adults as well as children. It’s still popular today in England and, especially, India, where it’s marketed as a sleep aid. (For further details, see horlicks.com, whose home page features an animated field of barley, just waiting to be malted.)

The idea of adding a few spoonfuls of malted milk powder to a milkshake appears to have been originated by a Chicago soda jerk in 1922. But malted milk powder is good for more than just beverages. It can be sprinkled on ice cream (sundae shops usually call this a “dusty road”) or mixed into pancake or waffle batter. For a real treat, roll some strawberries in it, or sprinkle it on other fruit. Lately I’ve been trying it on just about everything and have found that its nutty, complex flavor complements a surprisingly wide range of foods — gravies, baked goods, roasted vegetables, toast. A small dusting of it even works well on steak. Yes, really.

Even if you don’t want to sprinkle malt on everything you eat, you’re probably consuming more of it than you realize. “Malt and malt extracts are used as processing agents in so many foods,” Briess’s marketing communications manager, Bernadette Wasdovitch, said. “If you check the ingredients, for example, you’ll see that just about any bag of all-purpose flour includes malted barley, because the enzymes make the flour perform better for baking.”

Malt also shows up in the ingredients listings for many cereals, and Ms. Wasdovitch said it’s also becoming a popular flavor element in herbal teas. Indeed, as maltsters continue to develop more flavor profiles (Briess can adjust the moisture and roasting levels to produce malts that taste like coffee, caramel, cocoa, peanut, and so on), and consumer demand for natural products increases, malt may soon find its way into even more foods.

All of which should be very good news for maltsters — and for those of us who love what they do.


The New York Sun

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