making glucose syrup from starch

You do not need pancreatic enzymes. Amylases are present in germinating grains - like malted barley. That is how rice syrup is made - there are no simple sugars in rice, before you add malt to break down the rice starch.

Please note that complete enzymatic hydrolysis would take ridiculous quantity of enzyme or time (it would get mouldy faster). So what you would get is actualy a mix of glucose, maltose and higher oligos, called maltodextrin.

You can do hydrolysis of starch by heating it with diluted sulfuric acid. To get the acid out, you neutralise with powdered CaCO3 and filter.

Lacustral wrote:

I can't eat grains, so I'm planning to start with a non-grain starch, like tapioca starch or arrowroot starch. So I need to add some kind of amylase enzyme.

Does the hydrolysis with sulfuric acid that you mentioned, leave residues that are inedible?

thanks Laura

It would leave behind some calcium sulfate, i.e. gypsum.

I can't help with your problem, but in brewing beer we use the naturally-occuring enzymes that are present in malted barley (and wheat). No added enzymes are typically used.

How does this exactly work, like how hot, what concentration sulfuric acid, etc.? And can one get sulfuric acid, CaCO3 (calcium carbonate?) that one would be OK with eating the end product? (no carcinogenic contaminants etc.?

Laura

Is your problem with grains the gluten, i.e., celiac disease? If so, there are a number of resources out there about brewing gluten free beers. Generally these involve using malted white sorgum, malted buckwheat, and sometimes rice syrup. You might try this site:

Hope this helps.

Wayne Bugeater Brewing Company

I cannot recommend doing this for a human consumption as a sweetener on your own. It is not worth the effort and risks. And you would need food-grade chemicals.

Also, you can buy glucose cheaply.

Please note that glucose is very weak sweetener - several times less sweet than sucrose. What is wrong with using sugar, anyway? It tastes better, too. Or you can buy fructose or use honey.

Malted sorghum? I thought that contained lethal amounts of cyanic glucosides. The levels of cyanide might be reduced to safe levels during fermentation (I don't know, this is the first time I've heard of using malted sorghum to make beer), but the original poster is not planning to ferment it but instead to make syrup. It could be extremely dangerous.

Best regards, Bob

For almost 100% malted sorghum beer, check out:

First, get a second opinion on your allergies. One of my friends was diagnosed with something similar by her chiropractor but a MD found that her condition was far different.

Next, try finding a home winemaking supplierthat sells amylase enzyme. I'm doing a similar experiment right now with tapioca as a source of starch. I use my oven to keep the temp in the 148-158F range. I jst started the test today so I can't tell you the results yet, but I'll post later this week with what I find. Warren Place

Thanks. If I can find it, I'll have to try it. But that doesn't reduce the danger in trying to make syrup from sprouted sorghum.

Best regards, Bob

We heat, and many of us don't do explicit acidification-- we simply heat the grains in water and let the chips fall where they may wrt pH.

Wouldn't it be easier just to buy the liquid glucose? Or else buy powder glucose and make your own liquid?

The problem here seems to food intollerances - corn and fructose. You say you can't eat grains - does that mean all grains or just some of them?

Mashing a starch with enzymes (need both alpha and beta amylases), is not a very good solution as there are some problems.

First - a mixture of sugars will be produced, including fructose and fructans.

Second - And you need to consider the gelatinisation temperature of the starch and this varies with its source. Rice has a high gelatinisation temperature, tapioca and potato have low gelatinisation temperatures. The starch needs to be gelatinised before the enzymes can easily convert the starches to sugars.

Glucose syrup is mainly produced by acid hydrolysis of corn or wheat starch, but can use any starch. You can find information about the process on the web.

Some sugars in Europe are produced from sugar beet, so it may be possible to locate a glucose syrup made from this.

Making glucose syrup yourself is not going to be easy.

Lacustral wrote:

Only thing that I think is even remotely possible is using koji to convert starces to glucose. Search web with words amazake (sweet sake), sake, koji and 'Aspergillus oryzae'.

for example

But I would incubate in a lower temperature (35-40 C ?) for something like 1 day first and then increase to 65 C for 12 hours.

seismo malm

An update on my experiment: my amylase is really old and not functional. After sitting at 152F for an hour and about 70F for 10 hours, a starch test showed plenty of starch. I added a handful of pale malt to the 8 oz water and tsp. of tapioca and held it at 152F for 30 min. It was fully converted at 30 min and the tapioca pellets disappeared. Unfortunately, the mini-wort seemed to have a very viscous texture with a lot of particulate. MAybe a longer boil would clear this up? Warren Place

Through Googling, I don't think this is a problem. I have found references that during malting, the cyanide-problem areas -- the new shoots -- are removed. This seems to solve most of the problem. As an example, per one set of scientists, HCN content is reduced by more than 90% just by removing the shoots. Fermentation furthermore reduces it by 70%. Since I don't have access to a bunch of university library scientific papers or time, I can't look up how much cyanide is reduced by additional malt kilning, or the one hour boil that you would normally do during brewing.

Given that the cassava root, a plant that contains a bit more cyanide ppm when mature, is consumed just fine via simple techniques like toasting or fermentation, I'd speculate that the levels of cyanide one is talking about in sorghum beer are so minimal as to actually be a nutrient. :)

References:

and a Google Scholar search on Dada and Dendy. ___________ To reply by email, chop off the head!

The original poster might not have known that sorghum sprouts are poisonous. (notice how wide his crossposting net was cast)

BTW, about a month ago there was a news story about a bunch of kids who died from HCN poisoning after eating improperly prepared fried cassava chips that one of them brought to school for a snack -- purchased from a street vendor, IIRC.

Best regards, Bob