Tayyab123,
The reason I asked about your flour was to see if it was malted at the miller's facility. From the information you provided, it is hard to say although I did note that the flour is milled from Canadian wheat. I know that the Five Roses flours sold at retail in Canada and milled from Canadian wheat are unmalted but I have not been able to determine to date whether that is also true of the Robin Hood flours sold at retail in Canada. But it is possible, I suppose, that the Bravo flour you are using is also unmalted. I say this because after looking at all of the white flours offered by Wright and shown at
http://trade.wrightsflour.co.uk/products/our-flours/, many are untreated. But whether untreated means no malting is not clear from the Wright website. (For your additional information, I added several of the Wright flours to the listing at
http://www.pizzamaking.com/forum/index.php?topic=40212.msg401012#msg401012).
To get back to your original question, I have not done much with testing diastatic malt. In the U.S., most flours used for pizza making are already malted at the millers' facilities. The malting can be by the use of malted barley flour, which is a source of alpha amylase enzyme (diastatic malt), or by a fungal or bacterial source. Whichever method is used, the alpha amylase enzymes hydrolyze the damaged starch in the flours into simple sugars which are then used to feed the yeast and, to the extent that there are leftover sugars (residual sugars) after feeding the yeast, to contribute to crust coloration. Where diastatic malt is most beneficial in my opinion is to supplement flours that are unmalted. Usually, the diastatic malt is added to fix a problem, such as insufficient crust coloration. But, even in the U.S., unmalted flours are far less common than malted flours, both at the professional and retail levels. Many of these flours are also unbleached and unenriched. And some are organic.
The above said, the members' interest in supplementing flours that are already malted with additional diastatic malt was piqued by a recent pizza book,
The Pizza Bible, by a very well known pizza operator by the name of Tony Gemignani. That book and Tony's recommended use of diastatic malt led to two threads on the forum. I merged the two threads into a single thread at
http://www.pizzamaking.com/forum/index.php?topic=34845.msg346632#msg346632. If you read that thread, you will discover two things. First, you will see that diastatic malt is a complicated and highly technical subject. Second, you are likely to come away quite confused. A good part of that confusion stems from the fact that the literature and malt packaging materials used by producers of diastatic malt products, and repackagers and resellers of such products, are often incorrect, incomplete and misleading (see, for example, Reply 169 at
http://www.pizzamaking.com/forum/index.php?topic=34845.msg353229;topicseen#msg353229). That is the main reason why I suggested that you follow the usage recommendations of for whatever diastatic malt product you might choose to use, and cross your fingers that the usage instructions are correct and also applicable to your case. Another point to keep in mind is that the diastatic malt that Tony Gemignani uses and recommends and that many of our members use is a low diastatic malt product. That product has a degrees Lintner value of about 20. By contrast, the UK diastatic malt product that I mentioned to you earlier has a degrees Lintner value of about 120-180. That means that you cannot use the same amount of that product as the low diastatic malt. There may also be some experimentation involved to determine the proper amount to use to achieve the desired results.
Although diastatic malt can increase sugar levels, I don't personally don't consider it as the best or optimum way of getting more sugar. If your objective is to get increased sweetness, or increased tenderness in the finished crust, possibly in connection with using a fair amount of oil as Tom suggested, or to get more crust coloration (without getting premature or excessive bottom crust browning), or some combination of the above, I think it is better to use either plain old table sugar or a nondiastatic malt product. Table sugar in particular will be a lot cheaper than diastatic malt. Nondiastatic malt products have no functionality to hydrolyse damaged starch. They are solely alternative sources of sweetness and perhaps contribute to crust coloration because of their natural coloration. Examples include barley malt syrup, honey, maple syrup, agave syrup, molasses, etc. These can be quite expensive compared with ordinary table sugar and, unless they are used in dry form, can be messy to use in a commercial setting also.
I don't want to discourage you from using diastatic malt, given that several of our members have reported good results using same, and especially if you determine that the Bravo flour you are using is unmalted. But my advice is to use the proper amount and not go overboard with such use. That is easy to do since most people do not know that there are many different types and brands of diastatic malt and that they can be quite different and have to be used differently.
Peter
