Photography: Patricia Niven From The Beer Kitchen by Melissa Cole
With its warming spiciness and rib-sticking texture you will not be surprised to hear that malt loaf was ‘invented’ by a Scotsman. John Montgomerie patented the recipe in 1886. He had a new process of saccharification (breaking carbohydrate into its compnent sugar molecules) which involved warming some dough with diastatic malt extract and then keeping it at a precise temperature until the extract's enzymes pre-digested some of the starch. All sounds a bit scientific to us. We’ve put all our resources into working out the ideal amount of salted butter to spread onto each slice. We’ve experimented quite extensively. We’ll let you know the results when we have them. Pass us another slice in the meantime. All in the name of science, of course.
If you’d like to make your own magnificent malt loaf, we have an excellent recipe from Melissa Cole’s new book, The Beer Kitchen, with photography by Patricia Niven in our November issue.
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