April 17, 2021 - 6:45am
Diastatic malt and large preferments
If I make a large preferment (e.g. 40% PFF) and want to use diastatic malt in the recipe, would it be beneficial to add it to the preferment from the beginning (and then base the quantity on the flour in the preferment or in the final dough?), or should it be added to the final dough, although with such high inoculation the fermentation time will be very short?
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Hi Ilya,
40% flour prefermented is not really large, closer to the small preferment (25-35% is small). Large is when 2/3 of all flour to 100% of all flour is prefermented before mixing bread dough and beginning bulk fermentation or shaping/proofing.
Diastatic malt is part of bread flour itself. If in the formula you have 100% flour, 2% salt, 70% water, then in this 100% flour all its improvers, such as diastatic malt, vit C, lecithin, etc. are already counted.
There are recipes of rye breads where diastatic malt is not an improver, but part of the bread formula. It is then also counted as part of 100% flour, but in this case, all malt will be added to the sponge as being part of the scalded flour. In those breads its role is to help hydrolyze starches in the scald, to make is sweet as honey.
Diastatic malt as improver is added to flour according to its strength or defects. Too much would be too much, it might make crumb too sticky, weak and puddinglike and give abnormal color to the crust. If your preferment is purely rye, and only rye flour in our bread formula needs an improver, then you add all malt to preferment, in amounts needed to rectify rye flour defects.
Or maybe you have a rye-wheat blend recipe, and rye doesn't need an improver, but your wheat flour is way too strong and low on sugar. Then no diastatic malt in rye during preferment phase and diastatic malt would be added only to the wheat portion.
If all your flour is the same, let's say white bread flour, then you add malt to the flour as you weigh it out for the bread and blend it to homogeneity, and 40% of it would be prefermented.
Hi Mariana,
Very interesting and unexpected perspective, as usual!
For home baking 40% I'd say is a large preferment - majority of recipes I've seen only include a small levain/starter with ~10% PFF. I understand some approaches (bigas come to mind or multi-stage dough builds) can have much higher %PFF. And rye of course, but I was not thinking about that - I am considering a simple all white (bread) flour dough.
So since my flour has no malt or any other improvers, and I recently got some diastatic malt to play with, I wanted to combine it with the large(r) preferment volume than I am used to. And basically your suggestion is to just add it proportionally into both the preferment and final dough, according to the amount of flour used at that stage? Since I don't want to pre-weigh the flour for the next day (just to save a bowl from washing, really). Thank you, that makes sense!
Yes, add it like that. You got it, Ilya.
If you add all of it to preferment, it would destroy its gluten, because it would be too much of malt per gram of flour. It would look like overfermented preferment and will spoil your bread.
If you add it to the total of your flour, as you preparing ingredients for baking, then it would work as flour improver and you would have a lively fermentation on all stages of bread creating and a nice baking improvement overall.
Great, thanks a lot!