Do you want to know what the secret ingredient is to a
beautiful brown, even crust?
Well today on WTF, we're going to look at diastatic malt powder
and all the great uses of it.
Hello, and welcome to WTF where we transform food here in the
Modernist Pantry test kitchen.
I'm chef Scott Garren.
I'm Janie Wang, the owner of Modernist Pantry.
Today, Scott and I are going to be talking about diastatic malt powder,
which is an awesome ingredient to have in any baking pantry in our opinion.
So we wanted to make sure we cover it and how you can use it in your own recipes.
And as you can see, we have donuts and bagels here.
So I'm very excited personally.
So Scott, why don't we start with what is diastatic malt powder?
Diastatic malt powder is a powder that contains an enzyme called amylase.
And what amylase does is it consumes starches and it makes sugar.
So what it does in your bread, or in your dough, is that it consumes some
of the starch, creates sugar, and it'll give you a nice even browning.
Also it will help with the rise of it because more sugar
is more food for the yeast.
Yeah.
And I know that I've heard about diastatic versus non-diastatic.
Can you just briefly explain what exactly does that mean?
So non-diastatic basically just has some sugar in it but
diastatic has the amylase enzyme.
Okay.
And I know that, do you want to kind of cover, I see that we have a
beautiful plate of stuff, like kind of what exactly is the role that
diastatic malt powder played in these particular things that we're making?
Sure.
So we made donuts and bagels, two kind of, you know, breakfast breads.
And the reason why we did it is we wanted that nice, beautiful golden crust.
And we wanted it to be even.
So in these two bagels, this is a good example, this is the same exact recipe
as the one to the, to the left of it.
But you can see how uneven it is, right?
There's white spots.
And we cooked them at the exact same time, exact same conditions.
So you can definitely see how much more even and beautiful this is.
And you can also see it's a little bit more plump too, right.
So that yeast just had more time to rise and it, well, it had the exact same time,
but it had more food to help the rise.
Yeah, this is definitely a much tastier looking bagel for sure.
And when people are using it, obviously they'll get our recipes on the blog.
And if you're not sure how to get there, just go on the
link, it's in the description.
But they're like, well, I know that I've been making donuts and bagels
and breads and you know, whatever else, how much of it do I use?
So the amount can vary, really, to whatever you're making.
But you really want to use like half a teaspoon to one teaspoon per cup of flour.
That's really what it's going to be.
It may, you know, you may be making a recipe where, oh, I
think I need a little bit more.
I think I need a little bit less.
But just make sure you start off at that ratio: one half to
one teaspoon per cup of flour.
All right.
And outside of, you know, obviously donuts and bagels, what other types of baked
goods would really benefit from this?
The pretzels that we made here on WTF, I think it was episode 142,
we used diastatic malt powder right in the pretzels themselves.
So the sodium hydroxide gave that nice crust, but they were a nice,
beautifully even color as well.
Okay.
And all right.
So I know one question I sometimes get is people asking,
"Is this a gluten-free product?"
No, it is not a gluten-free product.
Which we've tried to make, you know, a lot of gluten-free foods here and
diastatic malt powder always pops into my head like, "Oh, I should use some."
And then I remember.
Oh, I can't, it's not gluten-free.
So yeah.
So unfortunately not, but and I know that some other people will say,
"Well, is it the same thing as malt syrup, I have that in my pantry?
I have malted barley.
Like, can I just substitute it?
Like it has the word "malt" in it, is it the same thing?"
No, it's not the same thing.
It's just like the non-diastatic malt powder.
It's just a sweetener pretty much, or it's sugar at that point.
Malt syrup can be used, let's say, if you wanted to boil the bagels
in malt syrup, you could do that.
But it's not going to add any you know, help with the rise.
It's not going to make sure it's, you know, nice and even on the outside.
All right.
So if you want to get this beautiful effect, you really have to get diastatic
malt powder exactly as it's worded.
It's a weapon in any baker's kitchen.
It really works for everything.
Wonderful.
Well, why don't we jump into the demo?
I feel like we've talked enough and it smells really good.
And so the demo is really cool, 'cause we're going to be making donuts.
And we went through quite a bit of testing to nail down a beautiful doughnut recipe.
And we started with something that was similar to a brioche, but we ended
up finding it was a bit too greasy.
When I eat donuts, I generally want to eat more than one, but I felt full after one.
Right.
So we removed some of the butter and we added a cream cheese, which we found
gave it a really nice richness, a little bit more complexity to it, but also
didn't give it that ultra fatty feel.
Also we noticed that our recipe was picking up a lot of extra oil and I
used you know, I came up with a way to reduce that oil by adding Methocel E4m,
which as it starts to fry, it'll kind of help repel that oil from coming inside.
So the outside would be nice and crispy, but the inside will just
be like a nice, beautiful donut.
All right.
And for people who have never heard of Methocel, what is Methocel?
We have an episode on it.
It's actually episode 120.
Like we said, links in the description below.
Methocel is a really interesting ingredient where when it heats,
it actually creates a gel.
And as it cools, it reverts back to a liquid.
So as this is cooking right now, it's creating a gel and
it's repelling off that oil.
And then when it cools, it'll just go right back to the nice, beautiful bread.
So I'm going to fry this donut.
The, the donut with the, the hole punched out in the middle.
I'm going to fry it for one minute on each side, and I'm going to
do that for four total minutes.
So it's going to be flipped four times.
Now, one thing I found is with the full, you know, the fillable donut here,
I'm going to flip it every 10 seconds because I want to make sure that there
isn't just a big air bubble on one side.
So I'm going to place it in and I'm just going to wait 10 seconds and then flip.
Interesting.
So now this one's at one minute and we can do that.
Ooh, look how brown is it already.
About 10 seconds.
And as you're flipping the donuts, it actually just reminded me that
I know that we have an ask-a-chef on the blog about frying oil that I
personally felt was really interesting.
Do you want to like give, give the viewers a bit of a teaser?
A nice little tidbit is I use the same oil to fry all my tests.
But when I, you know, set up this fryer for today, I took just a little
bit of my oil from all the tests and I placed it in with some new oil.
And what that does is it takes the broken down oil and it, it helps,
you know, condition the new oil.
'Cause sometimes when you start frying in brand new oil, you'll notice that it is...
Flip this one right over.
It doesn't want to go.
So, when you fry in brand new oil, you'll notice that it can be really
spotty because the oil hasn't broken down enough to get that
nice, beautiful, even fry on it.
So, yeah.
Good.
And after I do this for about two minutes flipping every, or one minute
flipping every 10 seconds, then I'm going to flip every 30 seconds.
Very simple.
And when those are done, I just take them out.
You can put them on a rack or I'm just going to put them onto
some dry paper towels before letting them cool completely.
Because if you try to put these, you know, directly into your sauces or whatever,
it's just going to run off at this point.
So let them cool.
I know it's going to be difficult.
Trust us.
We've eaten plenty of hot donuts in the past two weeks.
So 30 more seconds.
I just flip it over.
Okay.
We've got about 30 more seconds.
I can flip this one more time.
Yeah.
And I think just kind of, I would just want to go back
to the Methocel real quick.
It's such an interesting subject.
If you haven't already, link in the description points you to episode 120,
and it's kind of cool because there are so many different types of methylcellulose.
Yep.
And I think the oil-repelling properties of the E4m is pretty unique
and like there's some other cool applications that you can do that.
Like, was it like frying fish where there's a lot of moisture problems.
So it doesn't have to be oil, right?
Like it repels basically anything.
Yeah.
So I've seen it where people make like a little, instead of egg
batter, they'll make a Methocel.
So it goes into the Methocel, and then it goes into their dry ingredients.
And that's when you can see a beautiful donut right there.
And that's when it fries the outside, but it keeps the inside nice and
beautiful without all that oil coming in.
And yeah, and we love frying things over here in our test kitchen.
Tell me about it.
So if you have enough, I think that we also did an entire episode all around
frying and that was, was it, the link will be in the description below.
I think it's number 104.
It's one of the first ones we did.
Number 104, all about EverCrisp okay.
Yes.
Yep.
So we did, we did talk about EverCrisp.
We actually attempted to in one of our tests and it's kind of cool to get into
that, what we did during our tests.
We tried to put some EverCrisp into these donuts to get a nice crispy outside.
And look, you can see how beautifully even this is.
So when I put it down, right, it's gorgeous.
It has a nice, like, you can hear it.
It's a little crisp on the outside and soft on the inside.
I just got to give this one more flip.
But the EverCrisp in this doughnut, we were trying to mimic the
texture of a, a cake doughnut and the inside of a yeasted doughnut.
And what we found was, the EverCrisp in doing that, really kind of took
away from the, the gluten in there.
'Cause that's what it does.
It, it replaces some of that gluten and we really need a nice glutinous donut.
So this is the only thing that I've found that EverCrisp doesn't,
it worked, they tasted good, but it's not exactly what we wanted.
But we have a nice, beautiful product here that we find is
probably the best donut we've had.
Yes.
And what exactly is the difference between a breaded donut and a yeasted donut?
So it's basically two different doughs.
One is more of a batter, one of them is more like a cake
and the other one is yeasted.
This is a high-gluten, a high-gluten development.
And what we did was we put it into a mixer and actually, it takes about 25
minutes once, you know, the mixing process starts before our dough even comes out.
So it's developing a lot of gluten.
We actually add extra vital wheat gluten on top of the bread flour, so it gets
that nice chew, a nice pull to it.
Yeah, we can fill it.
We can glaze it.
We can do all these things without having to worry about it breaking
down, or, you know, seeping in with the flavors that are on top.
Right.
Wonderful.
All right.
What's next now that our donuts are out of the fryer?
We would have to let these cool.
We have to let them cool.
Yeah, you could eat them warm.
But I would suggest, you know, if you're going to do that, just
drizzle some frosting over the top.
But it's always best to let them cool.
And then you can dip them like we did with all of these.
But I think really, all we have to do is eat these.
Sweet.
All right.
And what do we have here?
Any special toppings?
You can do whatever you want.
There will be a recipe in the blog that is for, you know, different
frosting that you put on top.
But then after that, whatever you put on top of that is up to you.
You can do walnuts, you can do, you know, some coconut.
You can do, you know, shaved chocolate.
We took two of the frostings and mixed them together to make these.
Powdered sugar works.
So it's really up to you.
And then the fillings on the inside would be, you can just purchase some
nice jelly or if you make jelly or jam from one of our episodes, you
can put that right on the inside.
Alright.
I'm going to go for the shaved chocolate.
Alright, I'm going to go for just chocolate frosted back here.
Cheers it.
Cheers to donuts.
Yep.
All right.
Well, we should probably wrap this up, Janie.
Definitely do it with our mouths full!
All right.
So hopefully you've been inspired to get baking with some donuts, some bagels, and
you can add it to bread, really anything.
It's super versatile and it will bring this beautiful brown crust to anything
that you really want to make with it.
Yeah.
So we're excited to see what you come up with and as always get our recipes.
Check out the videos and well, if you do have any questions, we're here to help.
So from here in the Modernist Pantry test kitchen, I'm Janie
Wang and I'm Scott Garren.
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