Basic Ingredients Diastatic Malt Powder

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 finely ground into a malted powder, making it one of the most essential forms of malt powder for baking.

This diastatic malted powder is used regularly by artisan bakers all over the world — from Europe to the USA and Australia. It helps convert flour starches into sugars that yeast can use over an extended fermentation.

Diastatic malt powder, also known as enzyme-active malted powder, contains sugar-breaking enzymes (mainly amylase), whereas non-diastatic malt powder or sweet malted powder has no active enzymes and is used mainly for flavour or colour.

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!)