Malt taste testers: chocolate malt, caramel Munich and biscuit malt
A few years ago, Dan Ayo posted here about his experience with using chocolate malted barley from the brew shop in a bread. It made a big difference to the colour of the bread and the flavour of it too.
Thinking the same, I made small taste testers using three different kinds of barley malt that I picked up from a craft brew supply store.
malts.jpg
Taste testers in this case were seven different doughs each made with a base formula of 100g white bread flour, 65g water, 20g levain and 2g salt. I tried two different concentrations of each malt - 2% and 0.5%, and made a seventh dough with no malt in it for taste comparison. Credit is due to Paul for the idea of the 100g sample loaf [2].
In conclusion I'd say that the chocolate malt was worth the try and can see why Dan found it interesting too. There are many other interesting malts used by brewers that I'd like to play with as well, obviously there are rye and wheat malts, but also curious to know if anyone has opinions on whether things like an acidulated malt [6] or a malt with high dextrins [7] that might have an effect on the Maillard reaction would be a worth a try. And then there is the approach of including the grains themselves in the bread [8] which might be a better way to go.