"Selectively" precipitating maltose from wort?
I had the thought that you could make a decent high-protein food if you remove most of the starch from a malted grain and keep the other stuff. If you
avoid washing away the vitamins, you end up with a pretty decent micronutrient content. The usual process (seitan) of making a protein concentrate
from grain cannot achieve this, since it involves washing and discarding the liquid.
If a wort is steeped for much longer than normal (6-12 hours instead of 1-2), practically all of the starch is converted to maltose and limit
dextrins. Steeping occurs around 70 C, so spoilage shouldn't be an issue. If you can remove the sugars, you can then simply evaporate water and end
with the desired product.
Unfortunately, since there is still some mixture of sugars, it's probably hard to get good crystals. It seems like you'd end up with a syrup if you
tried to filter and crystallize by the usual heat-reduce-cool methods.
Roy and Mitra (attached) say that you can precipitate about 60% of the maltose from solution by stirring with calcium hydroxide and adding acetone.
Acetone is GRAS as long as it doesn't end up in the final product. If you're lucky this entrains most of the phytate and oxalate type antinutrients,
although those might not ever dissolve in the first place.
So you filter the wort, retain the solids, stir with lime, filter, add acetone, filter, possibly bubble CO2 and filter again, dry the filtrate and
return the residue to the original grist. Postprocess by unknown method. Hopefully the B vitamins don't all decompose or stick to the lime. All this
filtering probably sucks.
Filtering wort is usually accomplished by some kind of complicated process called lautering, probably due to the volume of material involved. I
thought I would figure that shit out later if I ever try this, right now I'm just spitballing.
The obvious grain target is amaranth, which produces sufficient amylase during malting and has a relatively good protein to fiber ratio (higher is
better) and the best protein quality among the grains.
Any better ideas? Any obvious problems? Think the final product would be unreasonably bitter?
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