Date honey
Date honey or date syrup (Arabic dibs or ribb , Persian shire khorma ) is an ingredient in various oriental cuisines. It has a consistency similar to molasses .
Cultural history
Date honey was used as a sweetener early on, wherever the real date palm was cultivated. Flavius Josephus wrote that the oasis of Jericho had an abundance of honey and then specified that the dates pressed by trampling produced a honey that was only slightly inferior in quality to honey.
In the rabbinical tradition it was assumed that in the biblical phrase "a land with milk and honey flowing in it" ( Deut 11 : 9 LUT ) in Hebrew דבש devash didn't mean the bee honey, but the date honey. In many Sephardic communities, the traditional Mus Charosset is prepared with date honey for the Seder evening . Saadja Gaon (10th century) announced in his Siddur a preparation of date honey, walnuts and sesame, which was seasoned with wine vinegar.
Ibn al-Baitar described the production method of date honey in the 13th century: you took fresh Persian dates and the same quantity of water, put both in a pan and boiled the dates until they crumbled completely. Then you filtered the brew and put it in the sun until it had thickened. In winter it was instead cooked to the desired consistency.
Manufacturing
The production by boiling described by al-Baitar is basically still common today. The optimum is a temperature of around 70 degrees, because the sugar could burn at a higher temperature; the dates are usually boiled with water at 55 to 60 degrees for about 30 minutes. About 600 g of date syrup (70 degrees Brix ) can be obtained from one kilo of dates . Date syrup is also created as a by-product where dates are stored in large quantities for months, so that the fruits are expressed by their own weight. It is therefore possible to obtain date syrup at room temperature using hydraulic pressure. This process produces a light brown date honey, and when boiling down, a dark brown date honey.
use
- Date juice and a date milk drink can be made from date honey.
- A dip is prepared from tahini and date honey, which is served with bread for breakfast. In Kuwait, this dip, seasoned with lemon juice, is also known as Dibis wa 'Rashi as an appetizer.
- Date honey is also used as a sweetener in ice cream, desserts and baked goods.
ingredients
Date honey contains a high quantity of reducing sugar (around 96% of the total sugar content). Pectins and proteins affect the consistency of the syrup; their presence makes filtration difficult, which is desirable in view of a light color of the product. Date honey is rich in sodium , potassium , calcium , magnesium and iron , with a favorable sodium to calcium ratio.
literature
- Nawal Nasrallah: Dates: A Global History. London 2011. ISBN 978-1-86189-796-1 .
- Muhammad Siddiq (Ed.): Dates: Postharvest Science, Processing Technology and Health Benefits . Wiley-Blackwell 2013. ISBN 978-1-118-29237-2 .
- MB Doma, SMM El-Shahawy, SAH Grawish: Processing of date honey . ( PDF )
Individual evidence
- ↑ Flavius Josephus: Bellum Judaicum 4,468 .
- ^ A b Gil Marks: The World of Jewish Cooking . New York 1996, p. 378 .
- ↑ Ibn-al-Baiṭār: Large compilation of the powers of the well-known simple healing foods and foods . Ed .: Joseph von Sontheimer. tape 1 . Stuttgart 1840, p. 411 .
- ^ Nawal Nasrallah: Dates: A Global History . S. 113 .
- ^ Faye Levy: Cooking Class: It's a date, honey. In: The Jerusalem Post. September 11, 2011, accessed December 29, 2018 .
- ^ Jeanne Jacob, Michael Ashkenazi: The World Cookbook . tape 1 . Santa Barbara / Denver / Oxford 2014, p. 737 .