Basic Ingredients HomeBread True Sourdoughs

DIASTATIC MALT

Unlocks the potential in your White Bread Flour

It is a sad fact that most, if not all white bread making flours milled in Australia are milled to suit the "fast dough" process. You really can't blame Millers, since this is probably still over 98% of their market. That's a shame for us Sourdough Bakers.

When producing True Sourdoughs, the long fermentation processes requires the white flour to have certain characteristics to suit this process. The ideal specs for a suitable white flour requires parameters such as Protein Level, Falling Value, Ash level, Starch Damage and Enzymatic Activity to fall in a fairly specific range to make it ideally suitable for Sourdough Baking.

Even flours that, on paper, appear to have (closer to) the desired specifications frequently have (wide) variations between batches.

A new initiative on our part is the introduction of "Brero" flour. More details here

Diastatic Malt is used to help convert the starch found in flour to sugars that are useable by the yeast over an extended ferment. It is used by many Artisan Bakers in Europe, US, and Australia on a regular basis.

American Flours are routinely blended at the Mill with Diastatic Malt. This is not the case in Australia. Hence US sourced sourdough recipes//formulas may not work quite as good with Australian Flours. Adding Diastatic Malt can fix some of these problems.

Diastatic Malt is a completely natural product made from sprouted Barley, dried and grinded.

Normally Diastatic Malt is applied at 0.1% of flour weight. That is 1 gram/1kg flour!

A little tricky for the average Home Baker to apply. We therefor have a Malt Blend available, Diastatic Malt 10, which is 1 part Diastatic Malt and 9 parts Bread Flour. It is applied at 10g/1kg flour (approx 3 tsp; over-use it at your own peril, it's powerfull stuff!)

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, ideally suitable for Sourdough Baking, we recommend you use Diastatic Malt 10 as one of the ingredients in your white sourdoughs.

PS You do not need Diastatic Malt when predominantely using Wholemeal or Rye Flours.
Brewers Malt, available from HomeBrew Shops, is usually Non-Diastatic. (and as useful as a glass door in a dunny)

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