Chapter 130 - Sweet Potato Kvass

Whether the people of the Ming Dynasty in Guangzhou would buy this prematurely released Liancheng red heart dried sweet potato was an unknown, but Wu Nanhai always felt that making money by selling such a primary product as dried sweet potatoes was too low-end.

Wu Nanhai said, “Dried sweet potatoes can be considered a direction, but the development depth is not enough, and the added value is too low.”

Mo Xiaoan said, “The problem is that the people of the Ming Dynasty don’t need starch. Who are we going to sell it to if we produce it?”

“The people of the Ming Dynasty don’t need it, but we ourselves do,” Huang Dashan said with a mysterious smile. “Not to mention the industrial demand, it’s also good to use it to improve our food. Starch can be used to make many products.”

Everyone subconsciously moved a little further away from this mysterious person. It seemed as if his whole body was exuding terrifying microorganisms like bacilli and viruses. In fact, 99% of Huang Dashan’s biochemical laboratory was filled with various useful strains, including not only all kinds of mushrooms, but also many fermentation strains in culture media.

“There is one thing that can both satisfy your export obsession and be useful for improving everyone’s food—monosodium glutamate,” Huang Dashan said. “I have a special strain that can be used, and the quality will not be bad.”

“Doesn’t making MSG require rice?”

“Of course, rice can also be used. In fact, it’s the starch that works. So sweet potatoes, potatoes, and other things rich in starch are all fine, nothing surprising,” Huang Dashan said. “Cooking wine, vinegar, soy sauce, and sauces—we could have made all these seasonings with rice, but the main reason why the food factory made so little before was to save grain. Now that we have sweet potatoes as a large and cheap source of starch, we can just expand the production scale.”

Shi Niaoren talked about his glucose injection plan, and Wu Nanhai expressed his strong support, saying that he could make as much as he wanted. However, Shi Niaoren said that he didn’t need too much for the time being, a few kilograms would be enough.

“It doesn’t take much to make glucose injections.”

Although glucose injections were very useful, they were not urgently needed drugs. It didn’t matter much whether they were made or not. Shi Niaoren was eager to get it done to prove the value of the pharmaceutical factory’s existence—the Executive Committee had invested so much, and they couldn’t just muddle along by dispensing oral saline solution all day long.

“The oral saline solution and herbal tea you prepared are very good. Please prepare more in the future,” Wu Nanhai said. “It’s been hot recently, and we especially need it.”

“Actually, I want to make salt soda water,” Shi Niaoren said. “Carbonated drinks are very thirst-quenching. But we don’t have baking soda now.”

“Soda water is good, a new fashion favorite—” It seemed that Mo Xiaoan was preparing to sell soda water to the people of the Ming Dynasty.

“Baking soda for soda water?” Wu Nanhai sneered. “I made it according to a book when I was a child—it was terrible! Very unsuccessful. You’d better spare us. I heard that Viceroy Ma designed a soda water machine? It doesn’t use baking soda and can directly dissolve carbon dioxide into liquid.”

“That’s right, it is indeed possible—he just copied an existing design from history anyway. But where are we going to find high-purity carbon dioxide? I heard that there are less than twenty large and small pressure-resistant steel cylinders in total. Making soda water is definitely not an urgent matter.”

Huang Dashan laughed, “You guys are really modern. All you know is chemical preparation and physical processing. You’ve forgotten about microorganisms—where does the fizz in champagne come from? What about beer? It’s not made by adding baking soda or directly injecting carbon dioxide.”

“You mean making beer with sweet potatoes?” Wu Nanhai reacted quickly.

Huang Dashan nodded, “Making beer requires malt, and wheat and barley are in short supply now. Otherwise, the special reconnaissance team’s bananas would have been done long ago. I’ve never heard of making beer with sweet potatoes.” He winked. “But I can make kvass.”

“Kvass?!” a few people shouted out together. This was a rare thing.

They had all heard of this popular drink in Russia and Eastern Europe. This drink was made by fermenting dried bread. Its color was similar to beer but slightly reddish. It was moderately sweet and sour, with a fragrant taste, rich in gas, and had a very low alcohol content. It was a very popular soft drink.

Traditional kvass is made by fermenting bread, but Huang Dashan knew that some modern factories that make kvass, in order to save costs and manufacturing time, skip the bread step and directly use raw materials rich in starch, plus several natural or synthetic fragrances. He had previously helped a boss from the northeast with the fermentation process of sweet potato kvass.

Mo Xiaoan said, “Kvass is much more high-end than soda water! The Ming Dynasty has many rich people. Kvass can target the female market of the rich!”

“I think it’s good enough for us to drink ourselves,” Wu Nanhai said. “Can it be done?”

“Making kvass with sweet potatoes is a new technology developed in the 1990s,” Huang Dashan said. “The process is simple. The disadvantage is that it lacks the aroma of bread kvass. There are no synthetic fragrances available here, so we have to add some things manually.”

“How do we seal the kvass? There’s no soda bottle cap machine, and no tinplate to make the caps. It’s a carbonated drink.”

“Champagne is sealed, and kvass can be sealed in the same way,” Huang Dashan said. “A cork, tightened with wire on the outside, plus a wax seal. The pressure in a champagne bottle is much greater than this. I’ve never seen a bottle cap machine, but I don’t think it’s high-tech. We’ll be able to make it in the future. Tinplate, as long as we have iron and tin, we can make it.”

“Do we need any equipment?”

“A few large vats will suffice,” Huang Dashan said with confidence. “But the various culture materials I need must be guaranteed to be fully allocated—the demand for strains and enzymes is increasing, and there is a shortage of equipment and culture media.”

Unlike traditional kvass making, Huang Dashan’s process was very simple. First, the sweet potatoes were peeled and ground into a slurry, which was then mixed with water to a concentration of 75%. Then, he watched the thermometer and first added a small piece of something that looked like a culture medium.

After an hour, he added another similar piece. In this way, he added some suspicious-looking things every 30 to 60 minutes. During this period, he constantly instructed the fire-stoking workers to add or reduce fuel to control the temperature.

“What’s this?” Wu Nanhai couldn’t help but ask.

“Several enzymes,” Huang Dashan replied. “Cellulase, pectinase, several amylases…”

The enzymes were added in sequence, so that all the dextrin in the sweet potato slurry was broken down into sugar.

Next was the fermentation process. He continued to add suspicious things, this time it was protease.

Wu Nanhai watched him inoculate, heat, and add water back and forth, having a great time. He was very suspicious of what he was actually doing—Huang Dashan didn’t seem to be making a fermented drink, but more like concocting a potion.

Finally, after boiling, cooling, and filtering, Huang Dashan carefully poured the culture solutions from two culture tubes into the filtered liquid.

“This is beer yeast and Bacillus weihenstephanensis culture solution.”

“Yeast is fine, but are you sure there’s no problem with this Bacillus weihenstephanensis?” Wu Nanhai was deeply worried about things like bacilli.

“It’s fine,” Huang Dashan did not explain much. He instructed the fire-stoking workers to control the temperature and always keep the liquid temperature at 26°C to let it ferment slowly. “After 16 hours of fermentation, it will be filtered and bottled, pasteurized, and then left to stand for a few days. When it starts to foam, the kvass will be ready.”

“That’s it?!” Wu Nanhai was very confused—it was completely different from what he had imagined.

“This is the power of bioengineering,” Huang Dashan said proudly. “This is just a trial product. If conditions permit, we can add some natural essential oils, fruit juice, honey, citric acid, etc., to make it taste better.”

“Citric acid is really a good thing. It’s needed for making canned food and soda water. It would be great if the chemical department could produce it,” Wu Nanhai thought that citric acid had a certain effect of purifying water, sterilizing, and disinfecting. Adding it to livestock feed could increase protein digestibility and improve feed utilization.

As for the food processing plant itself, it also needed this food additive—it was used as an acidic flavoring agent in the production of beverages, soda water, candy, snacks, biscuits, canned food, dairy products, and other foods. Finally, citric acid was also an antioxidant for edible oil—the coconut oil pressing project that was about to start needed it.

Huang Dashan disagreed, “What does the chemical department have to do with it?”

“Isn’t citric acid from a chemical plant?”

“Citric acid is made by fermentation,” Huang Dashan said. “Deep-layer fermentation of sweet potato powder to produce citric acid—this is a unique technology of our country. I also have this strain.”

“We also have sweet potatoes!” Wu Nanhai said.

“Order a fermenter,” Huang Dashan nodded. “I remember the Planning Committee didn’t bring a special fermenter. The technical content of a fermenter is not high. It can be made with carbon steel.”

So the production of kvass and MSG was put on the plan. Wu Nanhai and Mo Xiaoan discussed it, went to the Grand Library to look up materials, found a few sets of architectural design drawings and equipment drawings for native sweet potato processing enterprises, and sent them to the Planning Committee for approval. The approval form came down soon.

Mo Xiaoan went to find Jiang Ye—he showed him the equipment requirements and drawings. Jiang Ye took a few glances: this was simply an all-wood structure. Except for the shaft and the grinding knife, which were made of iron, everything else was made of wood, including the transmission rods and gears.

“Where did this come from?”

“From the Grand Library, the drawings of a commune sweet potato processing plant from the Great Leap Forward era,” Mo Xiaoan said. “It uses almost no steel, almost all wood. It saves material and is easy to process.”

Jiang Ye shook his head, “This kind of thing, to put it nicely, is an emergency substitute. To put it bluntly, it’s a showpiece for the leaders.” He pointed to the structural drawing of the sweet potato washing machine. “A drum with an all-wood structure, hardwood levers, wooden gears… tsk, tsk, did the designer consider the problem of material strength? And it’s manually operated. A few hundred jin of sweet potatoes, plus a full pool of water, even the governor might not be able to turn it.” He continued to look. “This set of things will be completely finished in a few days. It’s the same even if it’s made entirely of rosewood.”

“So it won’t work?”

“There’s no problem with the structure drawing, but the materials need to be changed,” Jiang Ye took a pen and scribbled on it. “I have to redesign it.”

“How many days will it take to complete?” Although Mo Xiaoan was not from the Agricultural Committee, he also knew that sweet potatoes could not be stored for long.

“At least a week,” Jiang Ye studied the drawings for a long time. “Engineer Wang held a meeting on the standardization of machinery manufacturing for us, requiring that all kinds of professional processing equipment be manufactured in a standardized way, with unified materials and process flows. The complete set of sweet potato processing equipment is certainly no exception. So it has to be redesigned. The materials, performance, and all aspects have to be considered comprehensively. We can’t just focus on saving materials. In addition, you also need a prime mover, otherwise you can’t drive the machine. Don’t believe this exaggerated Great Leap Forward pamphlet—many of the things inside are to fool the leaders.”

“I’ll apply for a steam engine, and a boiler to go with it.”

“No need, just apply for a single-cylinder diesel engine. This set of equipment can be driven by 10 horsepower. Don’t even think about a steam engine and a boiler now—there’s a shortage of riveters, and Zhou Bili and his apprentices are all building ships. It’s a question mark when they’ll have time to build a boiler.”

“Diesel, don’t I have to apply for diesel—” Mo Xiaoan hesitated greatly. Diesel was a very precious thing. He knew with his toes that the sweet potato processing project could not get a diesel quota.

“Just use coal gas,” Jiang Ye began to promote the newly developed coal gas generator of the Industrial and Energy Committee.

This new type of coal gas generator was developed under the auspices of Wang Luobin. The purpose was naturally to use the large number of single-cylinder diesel engines on hand. In addition, the diesel engine factory project that he personally presided over was also entering the project implementation stage.

The technical content of a single-cylinder diesel engine was very low. With the completion of the supporting workshops of the machinery factory, especially the foundry workshop, and the increasing skill of the new-time apprentices, manufacturing a single-cylinder diesel engine was no longer a fantasy. Compared with a steam engine, a single-cylinder diesel engine had great advantages in terms of volume and fuel efficiency, but the disadvantages were also obvious—no fuel. Whether it was diesel or vegetable oil that could be used as a substitute, the transmigrator group was in serious shortage.

In the obvious next few years, neither vegetable oil nor diesel would be abundant, so the coal gas generator, a divine tool in the era of oil shortage, was thought of.

They would not be short of coal. Even if there was no coal, things like straw, wood, and charcoal could still be found. There were basically no worries. Moreover, coal gas could be directly used by diesel and gasoline engines, as long as the engine was slightly adjusted. In this way, the modern vehicles they brought, such as agricultural vehicles, could continue to serve them after being equipped with a coal gas generator, until the transmigrator group could develop oil.

The coal gas generator would affect the engine’s power output, but at the end of World War II, Germany had also installed this thing on its half-track armored personnel carriers. It was said that even the nearly 50-ton Panther tank had been experimentally equipped with a coal gas generator, so the impact on power should not be too far off.

Wang Luobin designed several different styles of coal gas generators. One small one was specially designed for vehicles, and another was a complete set of medium-sized coal gas generators for enterprises, which used the downdraft principle. The structure of this furnace was relatively complex, but it could adapt to low-grade fuel.