I’ve been doing some beer brewing recently – in the past I’ve had ok luck using malt extracts, both dry or liquid. But this Christmas I got a partial-mash kit as a gift, so I thought I’d give it a try. Pretty simple to do, but in the end I wound up with about 4 cups of spent grains – crushed, malted, roasted barley. It seems like a waste to throw out this stuff, even though it has served its purpose for the beer. So I did a little research into what could be done with these spent grains, and came up with a lot of very vague ideas and recipes, but nothing real concrete. Many of the recipes out there use just a small amount of the spent grains, so I thought I’d try out something that uses a more significant volume. Bread seems like the obvious choice to start with, since you can throw almost anything into a bread dough and it will turn out fine.
Boston Brown Bread using Spent Brewing Grains
Ingredients
- 3 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
- 1 cup corn meal
- 2 cups spent grain (wet)
- 2 cups milk
- 4 tbsp vinegar
- 1 tbsp salt
- 2 1/2 tsp baking powder
- 3/4 cup dark molasses
- 3/4 cup corn syrup
Preparation
Preheat oven to 300 degrees. Grease two 9×5 inch bread pans. Combine milk and vinegar and let sit while mixing dry ingredients. This will provide an acidic base to help with leavening the bread. You could use buttermilk instead of the milk and vinegar – I’ve had good luck with buttermilk powder as well (you can find this in the baking aisle of most grocery stores if you look carefully). Then add the spent grain and sweeteners (I used half corn syrup because I ran out of molasses). You will wind up with a fairly thin batter, but it will firm up as it bakes. Bake for about 70 minutes, and then allow to cool for a few minutes before removing from the pans.
The natural sweetness of the spent grain combined with the rich flavors of the darker roasted barley (I had a Scottish ale kit that included lots of chocolate malt and roasted barley) pointed me towards a dark heavy bread, and the natural quick bread that fits that bill is Boston brown bread. Mark Bittmann’s excellent How to Cook Everything has a good recipe for this; I just reduced the liquid a bit to compensate for the very wet grain, and made two 9×5 loaves.
This is great served with beans or spread with cream cheese – or just eaten straight with butter.
