I stumbled on a post by William Rubel An Experimental Recipe for an Historic Pumpernickel. He says his goal is to make historically accurate pumpernickel that is "black through-and-through".
He has lots of bread history on his site.
Gary
I stumbled on a post by William Rubel An Experimental Recipe for an Historic Pumpernickel. He says his goal is to make historically accurate pumpernickel that is "black through-and-through".
He has lots of bread history on his site.
Gary
There is a neat picture there too.
One thing I don't understand about the recipe in the linked post. He uses some diastatic rye malt and then dumps boiling water on it. Yes, it's mixed with flour before the dump but still, wouldn't that destroy the diastatic quality of the malt?
TomP
It takes a mere 130F to deactivate.
Right, so why specify diastatic rather than non-diastatic, which would be easier to come by?
Maybe the lower processing temperature produces a different flavor?
He mentioned using diastatic rye malt for the amino acids. Heat does not destroy them, only the enzymes that release them, so..."Therefore, heating rye malt above 158°F (70°C) will stop further amino acid production by inactivating these enzymes, but the amino acids already present will remain."
Don't know if that is relevant because non -diastatic contains the same amino acids anyway.
At 20%, unscalded diastatic malt would probably break down all of the starches in the rye paste. That can’t be good for the finished bread, I wouldn’t think.
However, if the baker is going to subject the diastatic malt to boiling water, why not use non-diastatic malt instead?
Maybe there's some unexplained mechanism at work here but it isn’t apparent to me.
Paul
I don't believe there are commercially available non-diastatic rye malts that have not been toasted or roasted. Using crystal rye malt or chocolate rye malt would change the flavor of the bread.
The Stanley Ginsberg says "Amylase enzyme activity, on the other hand, peaks in the range of 140-170°F/60-77°C and grinds to a halt above 175°F/80°C. Many of the scalded breads I bake call for keeping the scald at a “sweet spot” of 160°F/70°C for anywhere from three to 18 hours; others allow the scald to return gradually to room temperature."
Equal amounts of room temperature rye and boiling water combined gives a theoretical temperature of 156F for reasonable assumptions about the specific heat capacity of rye and room temperature but not accounting for heat loss to the container and the air.
It sounds like Rubel is following Ginsberg in this step.
Gary
Right you are Gary. Before I got a thermometer, Ilya Flyamer advised me to reduce the temperature of boiling water in a malt scald by mixing boiling water with rye flour and then, once that had been stirred together, adding the diastatic rye malt. It's the old-school way to bring the temperature down to 65C by the time you add the malt & it works.
Rob