icemanxp300,
My recollection is that members of the forum started to use LDMP in their doughs because Tony Gemignani recommended it in his book,
The Pizza Bible, and included it several of his dough recipes in his book. To the extent that one uses a malted flour, it would not make much sense to add a high degrees Lintner value DMP, which is what millers usually add to their flours, since that would raise the total amount of malt in the dough to a level that would cause damage to the dough, by making it overly soft and damp and hard to handle. However, adding a small amount of LDMP to a flour that is already malted is unlikely to cause any harm if it is the proper LDMP form from a degrees Lintner standpoint. To this end, today I went back to Tony's book and looked at why he recommends using a small amount of diastatic malt, to wit:
MALTMalt is sometimes called the European baker's secret because it's frequently used for breads and other baked goods there. It's also a wonderful secret ingredient for baking pizzas in a conventional home oven, which can't reach the temperature of a pizzeria oven. A small amount of malt added to your dough will help it brown and will give it a subtle nutty-caramel sweetness in lower temperatures. If you're planning to bake your pizza on a grill, in a wood-burning oven, or using the broiler method (see page 202)--all of which can give you temperatures higher than 650 degrees F--you should omit the malt from your dough.The above excerpt is the first paragraph in Tony's book under MALT at page 16. In the two succeeding paragraphs, Tony discusses how malt is made and also the differences between diastatic malt and nondiastatic malt. Those paragraphs are standard descriptions.
Apart from the differences between DMP and LDMP as noted above, most LDMP products contain a form of sugar, usually dextrose. Offhand, I don't recall why the added sugar is used as part of the LDMP but I suspect it enhances browning.
We have had several members decide to drop LDMP from their doughs and just use table sugar, often for the reason you mentioned. In some cases, members, especially those outside of the U.S., can't easily find diastatic malt in their countries so they are pretty much stuck with table sugar.
As for your comment "I was under the assumption that the LDMP helped with breaking down the sugars in the flour making it digest better when you ate it. I don't think the LDMP has much to do with taste", I could not find anything in this thread that said that LDMP improves digestion. Member Marco (pizzanapoletana) often talked about problems with digestion but it was in the context of a dough not fermenting long enough. See, for example, Reply 4 at:
https://www.pizzamaking.com/forum/index.php?topic=1942.msg17216;topicseen#msg17216I sometimes wonder what would have happened if Tony did not recommend using a small amount of diastatic malt to the flours used in his recipes in his book, especially for flours that are already malted at the mill.
Peter
