Chapter 1054 Beer and Instant
Noodles Luo Chong has never brewed beer. How could he, a robot dog who studies the national defense industry, brew beer? However, not having done it does not mean that he has never heard of it. You must know that with the rise of the Internet in the 21st century, the spread of various technologies is also very convenient, which has led to the proliferation of various technologies.
For example, homemade lipstick, homemade candles, home brewed beer, etc. Luo Chong has heard people mention the process of brewing beer, and he also remembered it. It is not because of his extraordinary memory, but because the brewing of beer is too simple.
In general, it is to select malt, crush the malt, and then throw the crushed malt into water to soak. This step seems to be called saccharification. Then filter out the dregs, transfer the wort to another clean barrel, add hops and boil, and then cool it down. When it cools to a certain degree, add yeast, and finally seal it for fermentation.
During the fermentation process, the wort will generate alcohol by itself and release a lot of carbon dioxide, so the unique bubbles in beer are formed, and it tastes like a carbonated beverage.
Soak the malt, filter the wort, add hops and boil, and cool down and ferment.
To be honest, the brewing process of beer only has these four steps, which is much simpler than that of liquor! Liquor also requires brewing, distillation, blending and other steps, which is really troublesome.
After finding the idea, Luo Chong quickly took action. It was already the early summer season at the end of April and the beginning of May, and the daily temperature was over 20 degrees, which was very suitable for brewing and fermentation. So he quickly asked people to find barley malt, and also asked people to order a few new wooden barrels and iron barrels for boiling wort. Hops and yeast were ready-made, and they were available at home, so he didn't need to prepare them.
Seeing that Luo Chong was going to the kitchen, Zhan Ying came over immediately, thinking that Luo Chong was going to make some new dishes. However, when she came over to take a look, she only saw a sack of malt and a few wooden barrels in the kitchen, and she was immediately confused.
"Husband, are you going to make maltose?"
Luo Chong had made maltose several times before, and the children at home also liked it very much. However, the Han tribe now has real brown sugar, yellow granulated sugar, and rock sugar, so maltose is not as popular as the maltose in the world of the previous life in ancient times. To put it simply, the Han tribe is not short of sweets.
Luo Chong shook his head and said, "It's not maltose, but I'm going to use wheat as a material to brew a new kind of wine."
"Brewing wine with wheat? Beer?" Zhan Ying asked in surprise.
"It's almost the same, it can also be called beer." Luo Chong nodded in response, but his hands were not idle. There was a small stone mill the size of a washbasin in their kitchen, which was usually used to grind soy milk and other things. At this time, Luo Chong had already thrown all the dry malt into it and started grinding the malt.
Seeing this, Zhan Ying hurried forward to help. Luo Chong was pushing the mill, and she scooped up a spoonful of malt from time to time and added it in, following Luo Chong around and asking.
"Doesn't our Han tribe already have rice wine and sorghum wine? Why did my husband think of making beer? What's the difference?"
"Difference? The difference is huge. Sorghum wine is a white wine. It's strong and warms the body, but it's easy to get drunk if you drink too much, so it's not advisable to drink too much. Rice wine is like rice soup. It tastes sweet even with the soup and rice. It's more like a snack, or rice porridge with wine flavor. In fact, it has little to do with wine.
"So that's why I was thinking whether it is possible to make a new wine with wheat. The alcohol content doesn't need to be very high, so it doesn't get intoxicating when you drink it, but it's a low-alcohol beer with a refreshing taste, suitable for drinking on hot summer days. "After hearing this, Luo Chong immediately talked about his plan, but he did not say what the new wine had to do with the future food industrialization.
Zhan Ying did not doubt him. It was not like she had not drunk liquor before, so she naturally understood what Luo Chong meant. The sorghum liquor was really addictive in summer, and it made her feel hot all over. Rice wine was more like a snack, and it was sweet and popular with children. The Han tribe really did not have any wine suitable for summer that tasted refreshing and relieved heat. Since the leader had spoken, they would help.
Because they were making beer, they did not need to grind the malt into powder, but only needed to crush it to release the maltose inside. So the two of them quickly ground a sack of barley malt, but they were more troubled when it came to the step of soaking the wort.
Luo Chong knew that beer was not a good thing. The brewing process of wine is correct, and he also knows that soaking malt in water is called saccharification, but he has no idea how much water to soak and how much malt to use.
However, it doesn't matter if you don't know the proportion of the materials. Fortunately, Luo Chong's family is large and he can afford to waste some materials. If you don't know the proportion, you can experiment one by one, and you can always find the right proportion.
He counted the small wooden buckets that the guards had ordered. There were ten of them, and the volume was about the same as the bucket of water. So Luo Chong immediately simulated ten different water-wheat ratios, and then soaked them for saccharification. After soaking for about an hour, he filtered and added hops to boil, and finally cooled them down and added yeast, stirred them evenly, and sealed them in wooden barrels for fermentation.
After that, he asked Zhan Ying to write ten notes in the study, and marked the wort of different proportions.
However, in fact, the wort made from these different water-wheat ratios is exactly the wort concentration often mentioned on beer packaging. If Luo Chong is interested, he will definitely find this ratio on the beer packaging in his previous life, but he has never paid attention to these things, so he doesn't know.
Of course, it doesn't matter if you don't know, and the wort concentration is not fixed. Different brands of beer pursue different tastes. The wort concentration of beer ranges from 8 or 9 degrees to 14 or 15 degrees. Anyway, everyone can drink it. There is no specific standard. The only thing is to see what taste people like.
The fermentation time of beer ranges from three days to ten days. Generally speaking, it is usually one week. Short fermentation time means short production cycle. This is also one of the reasons why beer is suitable for industrialization. However, there are also craft beers, some of which require a fermentation period of up to one month to more than 40 days. It is said that the malt aroma is strong when the can is opened, but that is obviously not suitable for industrial operation, so Luo Chong has never thought about fermenting for so long.
The specific fermentation degree of beer is still related to the foaming degree. Thinking of this, Luo Chong couldn't help but regret it. He should have gotten a few large glass jars for fermentation. Now he couldn't see the state of the beer in the wooden barrel. He could only pour some out in advance to see.
The beer was sealed and waited for fermentation. The next important project of food industrialization was to be carried out. Speaking of the food industry in the 20th century, the invention of instant noodles was unavoidable. There were so many inventions in the 20th century. Instant noodles were definitely not a great existence, but they were a monument that influenced the fast food industry.
It was invented by a Taiwanese from Nihong after World War II. At that time, Nihong was in a period of post-war decline. It was the time for national reconstruction, and various resources were extremely scarce. In order to turn Nihong into another kind of colony, the United States also provided a lot of material assistance, including a large amount of food.
Unfortunately, the Japanese people's dietary tradition of eating rice is different. The Americans eat bread, but they don't have rice. The flour aid is a lot. It just so happens that the Japanese like to eat ramen. After the war, even noodle stalls are in short supply. People work hard all day and find that they have to wait in line for a long time to eat ramen. So there is a hotbed for the birth of instant noodles.
The production process of instant noodles is not complicated. It can be roughly divided into several steps, including mixing noodles, pressing noodles, cutting noodles, high-temperature steaming, frying and shaping, and drying and preservation.
The most important step is frying. Frying is not only the reason why instant noodles are ready to eat, but also the essence of convenience. It is impossible to eat instant noodles without frying them. In addition, frying is also related to the shelf life of instant noodles.
Speaking of the shelf life of instant noodles, as a representative of the early food industry, industrial foods at that time, such as canned food and instant noodles, did not rely on various additives to extend the shelf life. The long shelf life of canned food depends on high-temperature sterilization and sealed canning, while the long shelf life of instant noodles depends on frying.
Of course, what is used is not ordinary oil, but palm oil, a vegetable oil extracted from the fruit of palm trees.
There are many types of vegetable oils. As for why palm oil is chosen, first of all, palm oil has strong antioxidant capacity, which means a long shelf life. The second is the frying resistance of palm oil. To put it bluntly, it can be reused repeatedly, which is very conducive to industrial use. After all, the consumption rate of repeated use is low!
Unfortunately, there are no palm trees in the Han tribe, the Tang tribe, Takumi County, and Qiongzhou Island, so there is no need to think about palm oil. Other vegetable oils can be tried. Let’s not talk about the shelf life first. Let’s make it soaked in boiling water after frying.
Drying and dehydrated vegetables is simple, and jerky is also easy to make. Sauces are even simpler. This thing is made from animal oil and various condiments, just like the hot pot base sold in supermarkets.
Animal oil has a characteristic, that is, it will solidify into a solid at low or normal temperature, such as pig fat, butter, etc., and the same is true for beef tallow used in hot pot.
Of course, these ingredients are not the key points. The key point is frying. As long as you understand the frying process thoroughly, everything else is not a problem.
Luo Chong did it as soon as he thought of it. He first drew a drawing of a noodle press. In fact, it was a few linked rollers used to squeeze the dough. It was not very complicated. After handing it over to the guards, he asked them to find a carpenter to make it. First, make a wooden hand-cranked one. If it is feasible, then make a steel noodle press when it is industrialized in the future.
Next, he asked people to search for all kinds of edible vegetable oils that can be found in the Han tribe now. Soybean oil, peanut oil, corn oil, rice oil, sesame oil, linseed oil, ramie oil, tea seed oil,
etc., don't mention it, you don't know until you look for it. There are quite a lot of them. Others like tung oil and lacquer seed oil are also vegetable oils, but unfortunately they are poisonous and cannot be eaten.
During the time when the noodle press was being made, the beer brewed by Luo Chong was also fermented. After seven days of fermentation, the beer had foamed and produced a lot of carbon dioxide. It was poured from the wooden barrel into a transparent glass. Looking at the orange-yellow transparent liquor, the white foam that kept rising and falling, listening to the sound of the bubbles rising and bursting, and smelling the unique wheat aroma, Luo Chong felt as if he was in another world.
He hadn't seen beer for many years, but he didn't expect that today he would restore it under his hands!
(End of this chapter)
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