What is malt, and why does it make milk, bread and beer taste so good

This video is sponsored by squarespace malt , diastatic or non diastatic malt malt syrup , malted milk powder , chocolate malted malted milk balls , single malt , scotch malty beers .

What even is malt ?

This truly magical ingredient is at once , very simple and very complex .

Simply malt is any cereal grain that has been allowed to terminate to sprout .

Meaning it has started growing into a new plant .

Remember the grain that we grind into flour and bake is the seed of a grass plant that grain is melting in the field right there .

When grain is sprouted like that , you can eat it raw or cooked .

And it's particularly nutritious .

I would bet you money that the way ancient humans first started melting grain is they took some dried grains that they had collected and they soaked them in water just to soften them up so they could chew them , the grains sprouted when they got wet .

And then just gradually , people started to realize that when the grain is sprouted like that , it has all of these amazing properties for a fleeting moment , sprouted grain is full of enzymes that give us all these wonderful foods .

You sprout the grain you dry it and then potentially do other things to it to create tons of amazing flavors .

If you are not familiar with the malty flavor , get ready for your life to improve .

I'm gonna show you how I made my own malt .

We're going to learn the science of what exactly is going on inside these seeds and how they make foods and drinks .

So incredible .

First thing you need for malt is grain and it's got to be intact whole grain that has been dried into dormancy but is still viable , still alive .

Basically , I happen to have some leftover wheat from that time that I grew wheat in my backyard and baked bread with it .

I have two videos about that in the description , wheat is not the most popular grain for making malt .

Barley is the most popular grain for making malt for reasons that we'll get to .

I love having homemade bread , but I gotta tell you , I don't always have the time or the patience or plan far enough ahead to make sure that I've got my dough started and all of the rising time that I needed when I want bread because oftentimes we need fresh bread about 30 minutes before I want to be eating it .

So I have got the perfect easy artisan bread recipe for you .

This is my favorite bread recipe and I really don't think you could get much easier .

Plus the whole no need thing means you don't have to worry about window pain and making sure if it's the gluten is fully developed .

Easy peasy .

The ingredients are super simple .

We're gonna start with yeast .

So I've got active dry yeast here and we're gonna do 1.5 tablespoons .

So there's one , we're gonna eyeball that half .

I usually get my yeast in bulk from Costco , which is where I get this big one .

They haven't really had it though since the pandemic hit .

I'll link to it below the video , but I love this thing .

So we're just gonna give that a quick stir to help the yeast get dissolved into the water .

You can see it's already getting nice and bubbly bubbles and foam just means that your yeast is active and ready to go .

So now we're gonna add our flour .

So this , like I said , this is one of the easiest recipes .

There's no eggs , there's no fat , there's no milk , there's no oil , but it tastes amazing .

So we are going to do 6.5 cups of flour .

So this is all purposed , organic , unbleached flour .

You can also use bread flour and you can also grind your own flour , which I do .

But I wanted to show you this recipe in case you didn't have a grinder at home to grind your own milk .

You could see how easy it is to do with just all purpose flour .

Now it's time to mix all of this together .

This is gonna be a wet and shaggy dough .

So when you are doing a no need dough , it's not the type of bread dough where it's gonna be totally smooth and you can completely handle it .

It's meant to be a wet dough .

But the good news is we're not handling it because we're not needing it .

So it doesn't really matter if it sticks to your fingers .

We just wanna make sure we get this fully incorporated .

So how do you know if you need to add that other half a cup of flour ?

So right now I've got this fully incorporated .

I don't have any dry spots and so I'm just gonna do a quick texture test just gonna go like this and see this is pretty loose and goopy .

It kind of is holding as I stretch it , but it's kind of gonna just fall apart right there .

See how it's just separating and it falls through , it won't form .

So that tells me that I need to add just a half a cup of flour to this .

It's usually always 6.5 , a 6.5 cups of flour for me , but we can add more flour .

We can't really take it away .

So I always just do the six cups first .

There you go .

So now you can see this is kind of forming together in a ball .

It's not completely cleaning the sides , but it's getting close and we're gonna work , work that in there .

We just don't want to have any dry pockets of flour is what we're over after here right now .

And no , we don't have any .

So you can see there's kind of some strands in the formation there .

It's not a complete soupy mess , but it's a very wet dough .

You would not be able to need this .

And now we are going to use a tea towel and we're gonna let this rise just until it's doubled , which is usually about 2 to 3 hours .

My favorite spot to let dough rise is right on top of the fridge because it's out of the way .

And that's typically a nice warm spot .

So you can see this has more than doubled in size and it's only been about two hours because it's quite warm in my kitchen .

And so you don't do anything to this .

You can see it's puffed up .

There's little bits of , of little tiny air pockets and bubbles in there .

You don't punch it down , you don't stir it .

All you do is put a lid on and we don't actually want it to be airtight .

So this lid when I put it on , I only clamp down two sides .

So there's still some airflow .

Now , depending on what type of bowl you have , you can do this in a glass bowl and you can use like saran wrap , but just don't seal it all the way you can use a bees wax wrap , but same thing , leave a little bit of airflow .

Don't seal it , don't crimp it tight all the way around the edges .

And then , and this is an important step .

This dough needs to go into the refrigerator for at least eight hours before you try to use it because we didn't need this dough .

The gluten is not fully formed .

So if you don't chill it , one , it's really hard to work with .

You need to be able to form your loaf with it when the dough is cold .

But if you don't do that eight hour chill time , the gluten strands aren't actually developed and it's not gonna hold its shape and you're not gonna get the desired texture or anything like that .

So the chill time is actually quite important .

So all we do is we pop it in the fridge for a minimum of eight hours and then you can bake your dough and this dough will stay in the fridge for up to 14 days .

As you get towards the end of the 14 days , you might not get quite as much height um on your bread because the yeast slowly begins to , to die back and isn't quite as act quite as active , but it definitely will last you up to 14 days .

So into the fridge , this goes , so now it's time to get our loaf ready to go in the oven .

So this is still a really wet dough .

That's kind of the beauty of doing these no needs is your dough stays wet .

So I like to take a little bit of flour on my hands and just kind of dust them just a little bit .

So it doesn't sit quite so bad .

But then one of the tricks is having your parchment paper nearby after we get our loaf formed .

It , it really gets going above 180 F five C at those temperatures very rapidly , you are going to cook or denature the amylase and you will render it totally incapable of converting any starches into sugars , which is the whole job of a base malt , any malt or company that's producing malts will .

One of the tests that they will do is a test for what they call the diastatic power of the malt .

And essentially diastatic power is that malt's ability to convert starch into sugar or what percent remaining amylase is present .

And so something like base malts have a very high diastatic power .

Diastatic as in diastase , diastase is basically an older term for amylase .

This malt sold for bakers has lots of , to have enzymes in it .

That's what the label is telling you and why do we want those enzymes ?

So you just really eyeball this , you don't have to be super precise about it .

I like to do about half of the dough for doing this round rustic loaf .

So you can use like a bench knife or you literally can just get your hands in there , which is what I'm gonna do and we're just gonna scoop out by eyeballing this approximately half of this dough .

So I just kinda get in there .

You can see it's kind of stretchy .

So some of our gluten has formed , which is good without needing , which is even better .

So see , it's gonna stick to your hands , expect to get a little bit messy .

So our goal with this is to form it into a round loaf .

And so you're just gonna stretch and pull with your hands .

So you see we're creating like this smooth tat surface and this is what we're after .

So you can do this completely by hand just like this .

The advanced bakers add their own enzymes to bread dough in order to create certain types of rises and certain types of effects .

In fact , there's research indicating that chronic exposure to amylase is an occupational hazard of baking in certain people .

At least amylase can cause dermatitis and asthma when you're up to your elbows in flour and dough all day long .

Bakers use amylase from malt in order to feed yeast .

So the yeast will make carbon dioxide and raise doughs , brewers and distillers use amylase to feed yeast so that they will turn sugars into alcohol .

This is a lager beer that one of Doctor Duncan's students is working on .

You crush up some diastatic or base malt with other grains and you soak them in water to make what's called a mash .

You warm it up .

The AMMO ace breaks down all the starch into sugars and then you have a sweet liquid called a wart reasons .

Barley is more popular for making malt is that it has way less gluten than wheat does .

But if you have a bench knife , you can put a little bit of flour down and you can put it right there and I'm actually gonna grab do a slightly , a little bit bigger loaf .

So you can always grab out a little bit more here and I'm gonna work this in there just gonna keep pulling it .

But if you want to keep your hands a little bit more clean , so you can see how a little bit messy they are .

You can use this bench knife and you're just gonna turn .

So it's a push and pull .

So you're gonna push and pull the loaf and it'll stick to it a little bit .

You're just gonna kinda walk it , lettuce , keeps your hands and it kind of , it keeps creating that tension so you can see it's forming .

Oops , I flipped it all the way over there on me a little bit more flour .

It's a forgiving dough .

And while that's happening , we're going to preheat our oven to 450 F .

And while that's preheating , we're going to preheat our baking dish .

So this is just a large cast iron cooker combo .

You want it to have a lid so you can use , I like to use this one .

So I'm gonna put this in and let that preheat .

Oops , I got a little bit of dough on the handle there .

I probably should wash my hands .

I did warn you , it would get sticky , but you can use an enamel covered Dutch oven if you want to as well .

So if you've got something like this , you can use one of those .

And if you don't have any of those , you can simply use a baking sheet or a cookie sheet .

And if you have got like a roasting pan , then you can put that on top to create that sealed compartment is what we're after .

So if you've got the Dutch ovens , they work great .

But there's lots of ways that you can work around that with other things you have in your kitchen , I need to wash my hands before I touch anything else in the kitchen .

Ok .

So with your remaining dough , if you're not gonna use it and you're also not going to throw the bowl across the room .

We're gonna put this back in the fridge and it can stay in the fridge for up to 14 days .

So any time you want to bake something , you just pull this out and away .

You go , I think I might make some cmon rolls with it tomorrow .

But for the meantime , we're gonna put this back in the fridge .

So be very careful .

Obviously , this is really hot , that oven is 450 degrees .

So we're going to take off our top here .

You can see the steam coming off there and then this is why we like to use the parchment paper because it allows us to lower it in there without burning yourself .

So we're gonna get that down in there and then you want to make sure that you score the top .

So you can use a razor blade , you can use a sharp knife .

This is a bread lane which just has a little handle .

So it holds the razor blade and you can create any pattern that you want , but you want to make sure that you score the top .

So as it's rising , it's gonna do a lot of rising and we're giving it direction on where we want it to rise .

Otherwise it'll just kind of break out wherever and it doesn't look very pretty .

So you can get as artistic as you want or you can just do simple three slashes across the top totally up to you .

There we go .

And if you bake malted milk into a hard little biscuit and then coat it in chocolate , you get malted milk balls .

Whoppers , which I really only know is that candy that I only ever saw on hol when it gradually concentrated in the bottom of my trick or treat bag because I ate everything else except for the whoppers .

Never really liked whoppers .

But you know what ?

I have always liked Squarespace .

Use Squarespace to build and run a whopper of a website .

Whopper with a small w so as to indicate that I'm using the word generically now and not stepping on anyone's trademark in the context of doing an ad for Squarespace .

Hey , have you heard Squarespace has evolved to be everything you need to sell anything , sell your products , your time , your content , your story , Squarespace has always had the inventory and the schedulers and the point of sale technologies to help you do your business on your website .

Now we're going to put our lid back on and we're gonna put this into the oven .

And if you want a principal version of this , you can grab that at my website .

I'll have a link below there and it's also in my book , handmade and I have to actually double check really quick , believe it or not .

I don't have it completely memorized .

30 minutes .

We're gonna bake this for 30 minutes .

Ok , guys .

So it's been a half an hour .

So we're gonna take a peek here and we're gonna remove the lid and then we wanna get that brown a little bit more .

So I'm gonna put that back in for five minutes just to get a nice brown crust .