What is Malt used for in Baking

What is Malt ?

In a nut shell....or barley shell, Malt is a sprouted grain that is full of enzymes
that help in bread making and brewing.

I heard that Malt is great in bread making that it "conditions" the dough?

I looked up to buy Malt and I saw Diastatic Malt, Non Diastatic Malt and Barley Malt Syrup?

Which one should I buy ?

Diastatic malt is like a special ingredient that bakers use to make bread and other baked goods. It comes from malted barley, which is barley that has been soaked and dried. What's special about diastatic malt is that it contains tiny helpers called enzymes. These enzymes are like little workers that help to change the starches (a type of sugar) in the dough into simpler sugars.

Why is this important? Well, when you're baking bread, you need yeast to make the dough rise. The yeast likes to eat sugars, and diastatic malt helps to create those sugars for the yeast. So, it's like giving the yeast a good meal, and in return, the yeast makes the bread rise and become fluffy.

Diastatic malt also helps with the color and taste of the bread, making it look nice and giving it a slightly sweet, malty flavor. So, in a nutshell, diastatic malt is like a secret ingredient in baking that helps bread become delicious, fluffy, and with a yummy crust.

Non Diastatic Malt has beeen cooked so the enzymes that break down the sugars are not alive,
but if you are only looking to add some consistent browning and flavor you can use the non-diastatic malt.

The Barley Malt Syrup, is a cooked product so there are no enzymes there and it is used to
add color and browing for things like bagels. Many top bagel chefs like to add barley malt syrup to the water that they boil the bagels in.

I have no idea how much to use in your bread.....???

the recommended amount is somewhere around percent .1 to 2 percent , which works out to be about 1/2 teaspoon per 3 cups flour to 1/2 traspoon per 1 cup.

Here are a few videos to get you going in the direction of using diastatic malt.

Probably the largest question I find is how much to use.
This video is real basic and shows what I pretty much said above in
video form.

She uses the really small amount that King Arthur suggests below 1 percent
total weight which turns out to be 1/2 to 1 teaspoon for 3 cups of flour.
You wonder is this enough to really do anything. However the dough will get
much more sticky if you use too much. It also can make your dough gummy.

This video also shows what you do with non-diastatic malt that you use for instance
in boiling a bagel to give it that nice even brown color.

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Making a Lucali stye Pizza

Lucali's restaurant in Brooklyn is famous for their thin crust pizza.
People line up around the block for it.
" Kitchen and Craft" has tried to duplicate this pizza.
He uses a high protein flour and non diastatic malt.

I am not sure this is totally the best pizza dough ever but I love the video
and it is worth a try.

Enough for now, This project is just getting started.