Can microwaves speed up an age-old Chinese liquor process?
- A team of scientists say they have found a way to cut the maturation time for baijiu from years to minutes
- The method is simple and can be scaled up for commercial production, they say
A research team in China say they can rapidly accelerate the ageing process of Chinese liquor, achieving in minutes what would otherwise take at least two years to do.
And the equipment to do it can be found in almost any kitchen: a glass jar, timer, thermometer and microwave.
But it is undrinkable in its raw state and needs to mature for more than two years to allow the chemicals to break down, blend and stabilise.
Liu Jianxue and colleagues at the Henan Engineering Research Centre of Food Material said the ageing process could be accelerated by exposing the liquid to moderate levels of microwave radiation (500 watts) for 80 minutes while keeping the temperature in a jar to 45 degrees Celsius.
In a paper published in the Journal of Nuclear Agricultural Sciences, a domestic peer-reviewed journal, on February 7, the team said the composition of the microwave-aged liquor’s volatile compounds, which determined the fragrance and lingering taste, was almost the same as that produced by natural ageing.