Brew bees and bread

When I brew beer I'm usually left with a big pot of wet crushed barley.  4 - 5 lbs dry - probably twice that weight wet.  It's a lot to just throw away.  Thankfully, in San Francisco, I can dump it in the compost bin where it gets trucked off somewhere and mixed with all of our cities, chicken bones, moldy left-overs and yard clippings and turned into rich soil.  But better than that, I can feed it to our chickens!  It's not the best food for chickens so I give them just a handful each day for a few days.  Unfortunately, the spent grain starts to go bad after a couple of weeks in the fridge in which time I've gone through less than half of it.  

That's what I was doing for the first few months of brewing until I discovered spent grain bread!

It uses only a cup and a half of spent grain so most of the grain is still ending up as compost, but it feels so environmentally friendly to be eating something, even if just a small amount, that would otherwise end up in the garbage.  And it tastes great! The kids enjoy helping me make it and we all love fresh baked bread.  Who doesn't?  

This is a modification of a recipe I got from the Michigan Beer Blog (http://www.michiganbeerblog.net):

First you make a sponge. That's like a yeast starter similar to what you do for a sour dough, but this you don't let sour.  Mine looks like this when it's done:

Sponge:

1/2 tsp active dry yeast

¾ cup warm water 

3/4 cup spent grain

1 1/2 cups all purpose flour

After you've mixed it and let it rest overnight mix it with the rest of the ingredients (salt only for the last three minutes of kneading or mixer - don't ask me why)

Dough:
2 cups all purpose flour

2 cups whole wheat bread flour
1 cup warm water 
2 tbsp honey (mine, of course!)

1 tbsp of orange juice
2 tsp salt

1. Knead it or use your mixer for 12 minutes - then add the salt and knead for another 3 minutes.

2. Transfer the dough to a lightly oiled bowl, and cover. Let it rise about two to four hours, until it has roughly tripled in size.

3. Grease three 9 x 5 inch loaf pans. Put the dough on a lightly floured surface. Press or roll it into a rectangle, and divide it into three equally sized pieces. Roll each piece of dough into a tight 9-inch cylinder and pinch the ends closed. Place the loaves, seam side down, in the loaf pans. Cover loosely with a cloth or greased piece of aluminum foil, and let the dough rise until it almost doubles in size, about 1 hour.

4. Put a metal pan or cast-iron skillet on the lowest shelf of the oven. Preheat the oven to 450 degrees F. Heat two cups of water. This is for creating steam in the oven.

5. Cut two slashes on the top of each loaf using a sharp serrated knife.  Put the loaves in the oven. This is the fun part: Pour two cups of hot water into your pre-heated pan or skillet, to create steam. A lot of steam! and it's hot so watch out!

6. Bake for 15 minutes, then, rotate each loaf 180 degrees. Bake for another 5-10 minutes (or until tops of loaves turn dark brown).

Remove the loaves from the oven and let cool for a few minutes in the pan.  Then let cool for another 10 minutes or more on a cooling rack. Tastes great toasted with butter or with a little of my honey!

Isn't she beautiful?!