The Laurel's Kitchen Bread Book_ A Guide to Whole-Grain Breadmaking - Laurel Robertson [153]
This malt syrup is non-diastatic: it has been heated in its manufacture, and contains no active enzymes that would affect your bread. Diastatic malt, or dimalt, does contain active enzymes. Dimalt is most often sold in natural food stores in the form of flour. The flour is much less concentrated than syrup in sweetness and malty flavor, but because its enzymes convert dough starches into sugars, a small amount sweetens a whole loaf, making dimalt a good choice for people who want to make bread without added sweeteners. The dimalts that are available to the home baker vary in potency, but as a rule, a quarter-teaspoon per loaf is just about the maximum you can use without having the bread become a gooey mess that can’t bake properly.
For more about malt, including instructions for making your own, see this page
OTHER SWEETENERS
Pure maple syrup is one of the most delicious sweeteners, whether you pour it on pancakes or use it to sweeten bread dough. Be alert to its freshness, though. It does not keep well, even in the refrigerator. If mold forms on the top, skim it off. The molds can’t survive in the syrup itself, but other micro-organisms can, and they can alter the flavor drastically. If there is any question in your mind, bring the syrup to a boil—often that revives its usefulness. But even then always taste it before you cook with it, because when its flavor is off it can ruin a whole baking. The crystallized version keeps longer.
Sorghum syrup, from a grain that grows well in most places in the United States, is rather sour, and we did not like its flavor in bread. There may be many good ways to use it, but we are not familiar with them.
Crystallized fruit sugars (date, banana, and the like)—and for that matter turbinado, demerara, and the whole health-food-store panoply—may have some subtle advantages over supermarket varieties, but they are expensive for what you are getting, which is—sugar. Some are far less sweet than their more plebeian counterparts, so you may find it necessary to add much more to get the same sweetening effect.
Finally, a word here about fructose, which not long ago received a whole lot of attention as a sinless “natural” sweetener. It does occur naturally in honey and fruits and vegetables, but commercial fructose is a highly processed sugar, usually manufactured from corn syrup, which is itself a highly refined sugar. We can’t recommend it at all.
About the Ingredients:
Fat
Most of our recipes call for a tablespoon or so of oil or butter per loaf because even this small amount helps the bread keep longer, enhances its flavor, and makes it tenderer. A tablespoon of cool butter or two to three tablespoons of oil per loaf make what bread scientists call a “conditioning amount”: it actually helps the loaf to rise higher in the oven. More oil is required because liquid oils have less of the fatty acids that are solid at fermentation temperatures, and these fatty acids are the conditioning element. Different kinds of oil have slight differences in composition; as a general rule, the higher the melting point, the more conditioning effect you can expect.
Be sure it’s fresh: rancid fat can spoil a loaf completely. Refined oils don’t contribute flavor of their own to the bread, but unrefined oils do. The ones we have found successful are sesame oil, which has an emphatic taste (best when there are also seeds on the crust), and olive oil, good especially in sandwich bread and rolls where you don’t want sweetness. Olive oil has a high melting point and therefore some conditioning properties; bread made with it usually rises beautifully.
From the nutritional standpoint, it is best to minimize the use of any fat or oil, and for this reason we have tried to use as little as possible while still providing a wide variety of flavor and texture to the breads. You can, however, follow the recipes in this book, or any other bread recipe, for that matter, with no oil or butter at all; the slice will be chewier, the crumb more open; in most cases the bread won’t keep as well—though there are other