On the subject of diastatic malt, I haven’t found any drawback to using pure barley malt (210 degrees Lintner). Even at what would be considered very high usage, it performs well, and does not have significant detrimental impact to dough consistently or handling. The dough it produces features complex flavors, browns wonderfully, and delivers an exceptional crumb and crispness.
It does appear to create a softer dough for room temperature fermentations beyond 24-hours, but for cold fermentation, no change to dough consistency is evident. (I have far less experience with long RT fermentation, so pinch of salt with my notes here - it may be pizza “placebo effect” at work).
I’ve also looked at major brands that use the “low” label, and it appears most, if not all of them, are achieving the lower Lintner rating, not through a unique grain or milling process. Instead, they are adding fillers, typically wheat flour and dextrose to cut the malted barley.
For me, this means, pure barley malt is the better option, and to achieve the same results in a recipe that calls for low diastatic malt, you’ll simply use less of the pure ingredient.
When digging in a bit deeper on the Breadtopia malt, I also found that they don’t produce it. They are buying in bulk from Briess - a company that’s been producing specialty malts for about 150 years - and then repackaging for home bakers.
Given that most recipes call for very small amounts of diastatic malt, this is a pretty pedantic exercise, but given that many of us are intentionally hand selecting every other ingredient to achieve specific results, I thought it was an interesting experiment to run a few times.
Cheers!
