sourdough spent grain bread

frolickingmonkey · 01-14-2010, 10:50 PM

After my own experiments and success adding spent grain to the popular no-knead bread recipe, I gave some wort and some spent grains to a chef friend of mine to play with. Thought I'd share what she came up with. Below is the recipe, but there's some interesting commentary and research posted with it on her blog.

Quote:

Spent Grain Sourdough Boule

8.5 oz Sourdough Starter
6 oz Beer Wort
6 oz Water (or: 12 oz Water, 1 T Sugar)
3 oz Whole Wheat Flour
18 oz Unbleached All-Purpose Flour
2T Vital Gluten (or use Bread Flour instead of AP)
6 oz Spent Grain (still damp)
2 1/2 tsp Salt

-Combine all but salt, mix til shaggy, not smooth. Let rest 30 minutes. This is called autolysing, allowing the gluten to unravel before the salt is added.
-Knead salt in by hand or machine for 4 minutes. If going by hand, then rest for another 30 minutes, and knead again for 4 minutes, til the dough is cohesive and the salt is equally distributed. The dough should be a little tacky, not dense and tight. Adjust with water or flour as needed during kneading.
-Cover with plastic wrap and refrigerate overnight.
-Pull out and allow to rise for 2-5 hours (You can just go straight to this, if you don't want to wait overnight). The dough should get to double.
-Fold the dough down, rather than punching it, to let air out. Knead it for a minute or two by hand. This will stretch the gluten strands out all nice and nice, instead of leaving them wadded up.
-Cover and rise another 30-90 minutes.
-Fold down again, and shape into a nice ball. At this point, you can either rise it on the counter, covered, and bake on a stone or sheet pan, or you can do what I do:
-Get a sheet of parchment paper and grease it lightly. Place your dough ball onto the parchment, and using the parchment, lift and place into a large bowl. The bowl 'guides' the dough as it rises, keeping it in more of a ball shape. On the counter, it will spread and flatten somewhat.
-Rise for 1 1/2 hours, should be nearly doubled.
-After 1 1/2 hours, get out your sweet-ass enamel cast iron dutch oven (or seasoned dutch oven, or roasting pan) and put it in the oven with the lid on. Turn the oven on to 400F. Let preheat for 30 minutes.
-Slash dough top 3-5 times, or in a cross, or a pentagram, or whatever.
-Remove dutch oven from baking oven. Lift dough with parchment sling and place the whole deal into the dutch oven. Put the lid back on, and put into oven.
-Bake for 30 minutes with lid on, then remove lid and continue baking for 15-30 minutes more, until the top is a beauty dark golden brown.
-Remove, and cool yer gorgeous loaf on a rack. heh.

This also works beauty, eh with leftover cooked brown rice, scottish or steel cut oats, millet, whatevskis.