Whenever Joe makes homebrew, I whip up some spent grain bread. All the recipes I found on the internet treated the spent grain as a sort of add-on ingredient, the way you would treat cheese or raisins. I wanted it to be the main part–it is grain, after all. That’s what bread is. So after some tweaking (there will be endless tweaking, of course), I have come up with my own version:

Jasmine’s Spent Grain Bread
Save grain from beer making. You can freeze it until you are ready to use it–can also freeze dough or baked loaves.

3 cups all purpose flour
1 cup wheat flour (could handle higher ratio of wheat
2 tsp. salt
2 tsp. yeast
3 cups spent grain (put the grain in a coffee grinder or food processor and grind it up
¼ cup of sugar (can substitute honey, molasses or the malt syrup you used to brew) 
¼ cup of butter or olive oil
1 egg (Beaten)
1 cup of milk (usually use less, depending on how wet the grain is)

Mix together dry, then wet ingredients until dough pulls away from sides of bowl and all ingredients are incorporated. I use a Kitchen Aide with a dough hook–if you are mixing by hand you may want to make half the recipe the first time you make it to get a single large loaf as this large amount can be exhausting.

Knead for 10 min by hand or 5 min by mixer.

Shape into ball and let rise in oiled bowl until double–about 90 min. Punch down and divide. I usually get 3 average sized loaves out of this. Let it rise again in greased loaf pans or cookie sheet until doubled, (or slightly more as this is dense bread, takes about 1 hr.). Score top of loaves.

Preheat oven. Bake at 350F for 40 min, until deep golden brown. I spritz my loaves with water just before going into the oven and again 2 min into baking to make a crunchier crust, but it’s not required. Rotate pans halfway through. Let cool for 30 min on baking rack before slicing, or you’ll smush your bread before it finishes baking inside

I gave a mini loaf to my friend Iliea at work–she made a tasty breakfast out of it and put it up on her blog with some mouth-watering pictures. It’s that kind of full-flavored rustic bread that is perfect warmed with butter. Delicious!

3 responses so far ↓

• 1 Zero waste beer « everydaytrash // Jan 6, 2010 at 8:56 am

  [...] they chronicle their adventures in tasting and pairing and even brewing beer. Today, Jasmine posted her recipe for spent grain beer bread, an innovative way to reuse the grains leftover after Joe attempts a batch of home brew. Sounds [...]

• 2 Stewart // Jan 7, 2010 at 10:51 am

  How about sending a few slices upstairs? Trade some lemons for taste!

• 3 Jen @ homeinthecountry // Mar 7, 2010 at 8:07 pm

  Thanks for the super-awesome recipe. Made some yesterday (added flax seeds for some extra goodness) and it’s delicious… I don’t think mine rose as much as yours did, though – we ended up with 2 flatish loaves, not three. (I’m still working on my bread skillz, so it’s probably that I didn’t proof the yeast correctly).