Malt is sprouted barley. You let the barley sprout, the starch stored in the seed changes to sugar (through the magic of an enzyme called amylase) as fuel for the new sprout. If you quickly dry the freshly sprouted wheat, you have little sweet grains of deliciousness that mostly get used to make beer. But you can also take the malted grain and make it into malt extract (familiar to Roo in Winnie the Pooh). It's a bit like honey, but less sweet. If you dry that, you have malt powder, which you (finally) mix with dry milk powder and either make a beverage, or add to a chocolate shake (Chocolate malt!) or long ago you made it into tablets and gave them to me as a treat. I think they only make them in India now. So good. Yeast loves this stuff, it's often added to flour.
Malted barley flour is a fairly standard addition to bread flours nowadays; my understanding is that it somehow enhances gluten production and replaces bromate, an ingredient formerly used for the same purpose, which turned out to be a health problem. I don't know the chemistry, but I suppose Wikipedia does.
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Yeast loves this stuff, it's often added to flour.