The Laurel's Kitchen Bread Book_ A Guide to Whole-Grain Breadmaking - Laurel Robertson [109]
GRINDERS
For making malt flour, any grain grinder that you would use for dry grains will work, providing it does not heat the flour above 120°F.
If you want to use your sprouts without first drying them, you can chop them fine or coarse with a knife, blender, or food processor, or in a meat grinder. Do not try to grind sprouts that are not completely dried in a grain grinder or stone mill that is not designed for wet grinding.
For the sprout breads use a food processor, a Corona-type mill that can accommodate wet grains, or a meat grinder.
Malt
In scientific texts you will see the diastatic enzymes referred to as amylases.
The sugar most abundantly produced in sprouting grains—with the help of an enzyme called diastase—is maltose. The flavor is our familiar malt. Commercial malt is almost always made from barley, but wheat, rice, and other grains can make malt too, though in smaller amounts.
Added in tiny quantities to bread dough, diastatic malt provides an abundant supply of fuel sugar to the growing yeast, with some to spare. It helps the bread rise nicely, taste sweet, and brown well in the oven, just as if there had been a small amount of sweetener added to the dough. All of this makes dimalt as it is called, a great boon to people who want to get away from the use of refined sugar.
Be careful though: if the quantity of dimalt added is too large, the bread turns into a gooey mess that will not rise or bake properly. There is a wide range of enzyme activity in the various kinds of malt. Our own, made from wheat berries, is a low-medium activity malt, but even so we would hesitate to add more than ¼ teaspoon per loaf’s worth of dough. This amount gives roughly the sweetness you would expect from a teaspoon or two of honey. When you experiment with your own malt, start with ¼ teaspoon, and if you want to increase it, go gradually until you notice that your bread is gummy—then go back one step, and use a little less. Since the enzymes keep working throughout the rising times, use less dimalt for longer-fermented breads. We do not recommend dimalt for extremely long-rising doughs.
Our recipe for homemade dimalt calls for wheat because wheat is easy to get and barley is not. If you can get whole hull-less barley, it does sprout wonderfully and of course makes excellent malt. Be sure to rinse sprouting barley faithfully three or four times daily, as it tends to mold quickly. We don’t recommend trying to use regular barley that has its hulls clinging to its sides because we know of no way short of commercial milling (which would remove the germ too) to get the hulls off, and they are truly unpleasant and indigestible.
To make dimalt: sprout the grain, dry it out, grind it up, and voilà! Here are the particulars.
TO MAKE DIASTATIC MALT FLOUR (DIMALT)
Prepare sprouts as described, letting them grow a total of about three days, until the sprout of the little plant—not the thinner rootlets, which appear first—is nearly as long as the grain itself.
Rinse and drain well, and dry very gently on a towel. Spread the sprouts on a baking sheet and keep them in a warm, dry, well-ventilated place at about 120°F until the grains are completely dehydrated. This may take a day or two. To test them, chew one: it should be brittle, with no toughness.
Use a grain grinder to mill the dried sprouts into flour, taking care not to let them get hot as they grind or the enzymes will be destroyed. Store cool and airtight. One cupful of grain will yield about 2 to 3 cups of malted flour.
DIMALT WITHOUT FLOUR
If you don’t have a grain mill, you can use the sprouts—undried—to good effect. In an ordinary blender, puree ¼ cup sprouts with part of the liquid for a 2-loaf recipe. Alternatively, towel off the sprouts and use them whole or chopped as a sort of cracked wheat. In that case, since much of the enzyme will stay in the sprout and not enter the dough, you can use as much as a full cup per loaf of whole sprouts; ¼ cup chopped. The longer they are