Sourdough Stories 15: Spent Grain Bread

The Hubs was brewing a Red Ale this past week; since the homebrew beer bread turned out so well, I wanted to see how some of the spent grains would taste.  The grains from homebrewing always make for a lot of waste; sometimes we'll give them to our neighbors for their chickens, but when they don't need any, we have to figure out how to dispose of them.  I've used spent grains in the past to make cookies or granola (and I did make a batch of cookies as well), but after adding the malted wheat to the recipe last week, I figured some spent grains would work equally well.

I found a recipe online from another homebrewer who had done this before; I wanted to start there since I'd be dealing with an inclusion of an unknown hydration. Also, that way if someone had already tried it and it sucked, I wouldn't need to waste my time.  I decided to save an extra 125g of spent grains in the freezer so I could make this again sometime whether The Hubs was brewing or not.

Our Red Ale uses the following grain bill: 68% two row pale malt, 8% Caramel 120L, 5% Carapils, 5% Cara Red, 5% Melanoiden Malt, 5% Aromatic Malt, & 3% Roasted Barley.  He also added rice hulls during the brewing process to create a better filter bed so the water can flow through the mash more easily & extract more starches (we use a Brewzilla all in one system).  If you use Brew-In-A-Bag (BIAB) or another method, the rice hulls might not be necessary, and honestly the spent grains are a bit easier to utilize in recipes without them, but they don't do any harm--they're just kinda pokey and get to get stuck in your teeth like popcorn hulls.

Brewing in process.

The resulting spent grains is a mix of these malt grains + rice hulls, stripped of most of their starches but they retain much of their protein content and fiber.  Both of which would be a nice addition to some fresh bread, amiright?

The original recipe is for 2 loaves, but I divided and just made one. I also used my Kitchenaid dough hook to mix & knead, rather than folding on the countertop.  The original baker notes using a wet countertop for working the dough.  I feel weird about working directly on our granite countertops, and prefer to fold in a bowl to make less mess.  

When it came time to incorporate the spent grains, the original baker recommends rolling out the dough on a wet countertop, then spreading the grains out, and then rolling it up. But y'all...this dough was STICKY. Super Sticky.  I had to scrape the dough off my work surface and just decided to use the Kitchenaid to incorporate that as well.

Looking pretty before I realized it was semi-permanently attached to the cutting board.

Since it was a fairly wet dough, I learned my lesson from last week and decided to bake this in a loaf pan rather than attempt to make a boule.

Pre-bulk rise.

Post- bulk rise & overnight ferment in the fridge.  

Then into the oven she went the next morning, along with a partial pan of water.  And roughly 40 minutes later, we had...

...and oddly pale loaf.  I'm not really sure what happened here.  Texture is fine, and this is one of the few breads I've actually used a thermometer to confirm the inner temperature was good & fully baked.  Just...pale.  My best guess is it has something to do with using a glass loaf pan rather than metal, and that maybe the oven got a bit TOO steamy.  Ah well. Still tasted great, and had a nice light crust.