Sweetners in bread....info

greenspun.com : LUSENET : Cooking & Crafts : One Thread

Info by professional baker:

"Malt sugar, maltose, adds sweetness and is used most times in hard breads and rolls. It is found in two-forms, malt syrup or dried malt powder. This is the type most often used.

Diastatic Malt is rich in enzymes, if I remember correctly the enzyme is diastase, it is also found in flour and it acts upon the starch, liquefies it and converts it into malt sugar which is very important for a lean dough to ferment properly. It also may have some protease in it, also an enzyme but it works on the proteins in the dough to make them a more soluble form which adds to the elasticity of the gluten by mellowing it. All this adds to the keeping quality of the baked bread and the handling of the dough in production.

Diastatic Malt is very hard to control, I have NEVER used it so what I say from now on was told to me by others, and that sometimes the enzymes are not all killed in the baking process and they continue work in the baked bread making like a wet sponge. Not good and most likely the reason that some of the people you talked to, don't know what it is. I think that most people do not use it. I really would not know why you would want to use it for home baking, when fresh is the keyword there.

If you want to speed up your dough in fermentation, use part dextrose for the sugar. Yeast will ferment that very much faster then sucrose, cane sugar. Remember once we talked about 6 and 12 carbon sugars, dextrose is a 6 carbon sugar, and yeast can work with that without conversion, therefore a much faster fermentation. Dextrose is corn sugar, it is not as sweet as cane sugar, I have use it as the only sugar in a yeast dough that were handled very fast, so the crust color after baking would not be too light."

-- Marie (prettyhollow@yahoo.com), February 14, 2002


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