Hey! Who's hi-jacked my old thread!
Well, 'suppose I have a bad habit of doing that. Seems everyone is taking the opportunity to dismantle what I was trying to achieve? Serves me right. Here's a long essay to try and put it back on track:
What I was trying to achieve was come up with shortcuts and avoid pans of searingly hot sugar syrup cooking for hours on end. A conclusion being, let someone else do the inverting. Doing it yourself is fine (as
@mentaldental says) but the risks are there for it to go wrong (sucrose solution will start to crystallise at about 66% concentration, and there are other more obvious accidents waiting to happen). For those that might have "impaired manipulative skills", or of a nervous disposition, limiting the boiling sugar step is a grand idea. There's clear "baker's invert" or I plumped for Golden Syrup.
Golden Syrup has the advantage of being partially caramelised already and is vary similar to Invert Sugar No.1. What's that? It doesn't taste or have the sugar content of the Ragus product? I would certainly hope not! I don't know how Ragus got itself established as the only "true" invert sugar, but it is many peoples idea of "true" invert; despite being 20% highly refined glucose powder, added so the syrup can be formed into blocks for easier transport. Oh, and the blocks are 25Kg (
of which only 20Kgs is the actual Invert) and doesn't come in smaller quantities and is hellish to attempt dividing into smaller quantities.
As far as I've been able to deduce, the Lyle's product is still made to the original process (where it is refined from waste product of other sugar
cane refining processes). Certainly the "nutritional information" lists 0.5% protein: This will be important later. It's "partially inverted", but that actually means "mostly inverted" (most "sucrose" has been split into glucose and fructose during the processing).
Why invert? Don't believe the clap-trap about it being easier for yeast to process, or it having a "different flavour profile"; you want invert sugar because one of the products (fructose) has a much lower temperature at which it caramelises (110°C rather than 160°C for sucrose and glucose) and the caramelisation creates the colour (and much of the flavours) we want.
So using the oven method described by
@Hanglow you can "bake" the golden syrup at 115-120°C to get the No.2 and No.3 colours. I think I'll use "Brewers Caramel" if I ever want to take No.3 to No.4 colour?
Now, "Maillard's Reactions". Doesn't seem to be much you can do about ensuring this process happens in the way you might want, except ensure the required elements are in place: Those being the proteins (amino-acids) mentioned earlier. So using Lyle's Golden Syrup should do that, "homemade" and "supermarket" golden syrup
does not. Earlier in this thread I was adding molasses to get the proteins, but molasses cloaks the actual colour of syrup you're trying to make which just makes things harder (or as I learnt, deceiving!) . Note they did not understand Maillard Reactions making Invert Syrup in the 19th Century, but made it anyway.
Hopefully that summarises where this thread had got to? I'll be using Lyle's Golden Syrup (
Amazon UK link) to knock up some No.3 for a Barclay Perkins KK (1924) recipe in Ron Pattinson's "Strong Vol2" book. KK = "Burton"; Fuller's did one too ("OBE") that lasted a bit longer before morphed into today's "ESB".
. The "No.1 Invert" was only coloured to look like No.2 with molasses. I still needed to cook it long enough for No.1 to change to No.3 Invert (3 hours?).
