Malting involves sprouting grain for a few days under slightly heated conditions. The malt used for bread is usually made from the same grains utilized in the malt for beer or whiskey: barley and rye. In bread making, malt is used to accelerate the action of enzymes on the dough. Without getting too deep into the chemistry of this, the malt powder used in bread making contains the enzyme diastase so it is called diastatic. During the malting process, the diastase enzyme converts starch in the sprouted grain to produce maltose, a sugar. This explains why bread made with the malted grain flour has sweet undertones even when no additional sweetener is added.
In eastern European countries, rye has long been an important base for malt, often in the form of a syrup, which is used as a sweetener. It was especially useful in the shtetls and peasant villages of my ancestors, where cane sugar and even beet sugar might have been too costly and rye malt syrup did the job just fine.
HOW TO TASTE BREAD
Tasting bread and assessing its flavor is different than with most other foods. With a steak, a scoop of ice cream, or a ripe peach, the process is usually the same: You take a bite, your teeth come together as you begin to chew, aromas drift into your nose, and only then do you decide, This is how this thing tastes. You do this naturally, without even thinking about it. It’s a bit of a different story with bread, which has a long finish, as wine enthusiasts might say. When you take a bite of bread, the flavor changes, deepens, and broadens as you chew, and you get echoes of flavor as you swallow.
Even though bread is made very simply from just a few ingredients, the flavor of a well-made loaf is as elegant as a dish at a great restaurant. And as with the best wine or cheese, there is enormous subtlety and nuance depending on how these few ingredients are prepared. The difference between right and almost-right preparation is crucial.
Just as Cabernet grapes will express themselves differently in a Bordeaux wine than in a Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignon, a sourdough rye will also express itself differently in Birmingham than in Brooklyn. Much depends on the origin and quality of the grain. Then, when making dough, external factors such as humidity, altitude, temperature, and mineral content of the water affect the outcome. The makeup of the local wild yeast population comes into play as well, especially with sourdoughs.
Make a bread in two different places and you will have two different outcomes. I once did an experiment when I was working in Las Vegas in which I fermented two identical batches of dough in two different environments. I stored one in a cold room that was devoted entirely to bread dough. I placed the other in the garde-manger, where fruits and vegetables are stored. After leaving them for a day, I tested the doughs for flavor and aroma. The bread from my fermenting room tasted as I expected it to. The flavors were pure and strong. The loaf from the fruit and vegetable storeroom and compared it with the bread that had been stored as usual, it smelled a bit like a very jumbled fruit salad—confusing and not very bread-like. Moral of the story: Much depends on where you make your dough.