Effect of barley malt flour on the quality of Barbari dough and bread

Barbari bread is one of the most widely used breads in Iran which has high loss. Consequently, finding a solution for quality improvement of this type of bread seems to be necessary. One way to achieve this goal is optimizing of flour enzymatic activity by using enzyme sources such as barley malt. The purpose of this research was to optimizing the percentage of barley malt flour in order to improve the quality of Barbari bread. To this purpose, barley malt flour was added to flour at concentrations of 0.5, 1, 2 and 4% based on flour weight and five bread samples including control sample (without barley malt) and four samples containing mentioned added amount of barley malt were prepared. In the next step, some experiments were fulfilled to measure the quality of bread samples. By adding barley malt flour up to 1% on flour weight, width/height ratio, oven spring, water absorption, dough development time and Farinograph quality number increased; whereas the falling number and crumb hardness of fresh bread was decreased with the increasing amount of barley malt. Microstructure of bread which were studied by SEM, showed that barley malt up to 1%, creating some type of fluidity in cell walls. Sensory evaluation showed that the quality of the sample containing 4% of barley malt flour was lower than the control sample because of its malty taste and sticky crumb. As a result of this research, the sample with 1% of barley malt flour was recognized as the best bread sample.