Spent Grain Bread
Thoughts:
I played around a bit and came up with this great, simple recipe for bread with spent grain. As with most recipes, it’s a starting point. Feel free to innovate and add other seeds, grains, flours, oats, sugars, etc. to make it your own. Just be sure to share your results! I certainly plan to keep trying new variations on it.
The resulting bread from this recipe is hearty in the extreme. The spent grains give each bite a little crunch, which is wonderful. It makes for a great toast, and even small sandwiches. I was partial to the very un-Westerosi PB&J, myself. :)
For the recipe, head on over to the brew blog, Game of Brews!
Sounds good–but a little help here–what is a “spent grain”?
Well! I’m planning to add some more on this later, but spent grain is basically the grain that has been used in brewing. It’s usually malted barley, so has some sweetness to it.
I’m curious how this bread would taste with Marmite. Since both are made with leftover brewing products, I wonder how well they would go together.
What a great thought!
Where would one go about getting spent grain if one doesn’t do homebrew?
Hmmm… it might be time to make new friends. :) I’ll poke around and see what I come up with!
I’ve been doing this with my spent brewing grain for a while, after modifying the Umma’s olive loaf recipe. It comes out great and it’s fun to see the different flavors provided by different mixes of grain.
As for making spent grain, I guess you could heat a pan to ~170 degrees, steep the grain in it for about an hour, then strain it out. That would soften it and make it less sweet – you’d basically be mashing the grain like for making beer but discarding the wort rather than using it.
So it says the grain should be dried…but after you “spend it” making wort, it’s soaked. Do you then spread it out and dry it back out? Can you dry a little and then just use it a bit damp? I would think putting it in the oven to dry would overtoast it, but maybe I’m wrong. Any ideas?
I homebrew a lot and this would be much better than pitching spent grain out (since I live in NYC and don’t have a yard or compost program).
The way I dry my spent grain is by spreading it across a baking sheet and putting it in the oven on a very low temp (200ish?) for a few hours. It comes out dry after that. I often sync this up to cooking things in my dutch oven over 4 – 7 hour periods!
That’s usually the way I do it, too. I love the idea of cooking something else at the same time too, though. What’s your favorite recipe for the dutch oven?
@Michael Kingery
I have understood that a simple way to create spent grains is to brew rejuvelac, which is simply grains let to ferment in clean water for a few days, and should you not be willing to go and source grains traditionally meant for beer, simple brown rice works as a rejuvelac grain source and is common in regular stores.