Diastatic malt powder is powerful ingredient that should be found in every sourdough baker’s bread making supplies.
What is diastatic malt?
Diastatic malt is a completely natural product made from sprouted barley or wheat. It is dried and grinded.
This powder is used regularly by artisan bakers all over the world, from Europe to USA and Australia. It helps convert the flour starch into sugars useable by the yeast over an extended ferment. Diastatic malt powder contains sugar breaking active enzymes (mainly amylase) whereas non-diastatic malt powder has no enzymes.
Why use diastatic malt?
American flour is routinely blended at the mill with diastatic malt. This is not the case in Australia. Hence USA sourced sourdough recipes or formulas may not work quite as well with Australian flour. Adding diastatic malt can fix some of these problems.
Adding diastatic malt to your final dough can improve volume, flavour, colour, and texture. Until we find a miller that is willing (and capable) of producing white flour suitable for sourdough baking, we recommend you use Diastatic Malt 10 as one of the ingredients in your white sourdoughs.
Please note that you do not need diastatic malt when predominantly using wholemeal or rye flour.
Usage of pure diastatic malt
Normally pure diastatic malt is applied at 0.1% of Flours weight. That is 1 gram per 1kg of flour!
Usage of Diastatic Malt 10
If you feel that a pure malt is too difficult for you to master at the moment, we also sell a malt blend called Diastatic Malt 10, which is 1 part diastatic malt and 9 parts bread flour. It is applied at 10g per 1kg of flour (approximately 3 teaspoons; overuse it at your own peril, it’s powerful stuff!)
Carol Buxton (verified owner) –
I use this in my bread recipes, baguettes, Kaiser rolls and pizza dough, the crust is nice and the bread texture is great. A great bread enhancer.