Sikhye

A rice drink sweetened by malt

Sikhye is a Korean rice drink that is sweet without sugar in its basic form. It is made from cooked rice and the water drawn from barley malt powder (yeotgireum-garu). The malt's enzymes turn part of the rice starch into sugars during a warm hold, and the rice grains themselves are the visible sign of progress: they loosen and float when enough of the starch has been converted. The drink is served cold, with the rinsed rice and a garnish of pine nuts and jujube, and it is not alcoholic.

Because the sweetness comes from the enzyme conversion rather than from added sugar, the warm hold is the step that decides the drink. Too short and the rice stays heavy and the drink tastes of starch; held too hot, the enzymes that do the work are destroyed. Sugar is optional and is added at the boil in the recipe given.

How the method runs

The malt powder is whisked into cold water and left for two to three hours so that the powder settles. The clear water is then poured off, and the washed rice is cooked with a little water in a rice cooker. When the rice is done, the clear malt water is poured over it, the cooker is set to its warm setting, and the mixture is left. The reserved sediment is covered with a second measure of water and allowed to settle again.

After about four hours the mixture is checked for rice grains floating; if few have risen, the hold is extended by an hour. The hot liquid is then poured into a large pot, mixed with a further measure of the clear malt water, covered and boiled for ten minutes, with the sugar added at this stage if used. The boil stops the enzyme conversion. Without a rice cooker, the same mixture is held between 50 and 65°C for about four hours, measured in the liquid, before the boil.

A regional chilli variant

The Korean Traditional Knowledge Portal keeps gochu sikhye, a chilli sikhye from South Chungcheong, as a separate regional food. Its record is a 2008 collection, and it describes an overnight hold at 50-60°C without naming an appliance. It is a different preparation from the rice-cooker sikhye above, and the two are not merged here. The regional entry is recorded as a documented variant only.

Heat, spores and cold storage

A 2012 study in Letters in Applied Microbiology treated Bacillus cereus spores as the hazard in sikhye and tested modified tyndallisation processes. The reported D95 values were 2.8 to 4.9 minutes at 95°C, and the conventional heat treatment was the least effective of those tested. A ten-minute boil is therefore not sterilisation, and it does not replace refrigeration.

The publisher's method says to refrigerate the liquid in a glass jar and to keep the rinsed rice in cold water in an airtight container in the refrigerator, floating some rice in each serving. No keeping time is given in the sources, and none is stated here.

Open questions

No yield is printed, so the batch size and the scaling are not known. The warm setting of rice cookers is not stated and must be measured in the liquid. The keeping time for the finished drink and for the rinsed rice is not given. The page's quantities and holds were read from the source's text and should be checked against the live page when it is next opened.