Beer grains
Hello all, I am new here and am not sure where to ask this question, so I came here. I have been baking for a number of years and have always just stuck to basic breads and bought the usual ingredients, but have recently ventured into a new area.
I am a brewer and have been baking with spent grains I bring home from work. The texture is a nice change, and adds an interesting element. However, since there is little gluten in spent beer grains, you can only use a small percentage of them so you don't get any of the "beer grain" flavor. Which led me to ask, is it possible for me to use beer grains such as Munich malt, 2 row, crystal, roasted barley etc., before they've been mashed and stripped of their gluten and other properties and mill those into flower and bake with them exclusively? Would that work? Could I take the grain for my stout recipe for brewing, mill it into flour and make a "stout bread"? I know that most commercial flour processors put only a small amount of malted barley in with non diastatic flour because of the high diastatic power of malted barley. But if a recipe called for equal parts whole wheat flour and all purpose flour could I substitute in beer grains for the all purpose flour and still get a good bread? What would happen if I did that? Has anyone tried it? If so, do I have to dehusk the beer grain during milling? I can't seem to find answers for these questions. Thanks for any advice.
Like you might add some non gluten flour or any other "added" ingredients to bread. So, as an educated guess, i'd say 10-20% of the flour could be substituted for spent grains. They will add flavour to the bread.
You might want to look into making barm bread. If you are familiar with the sourdough process then it works in a similar way. Take a sourdough recipe then build your starter by using barm and flour. Allow that to bubble up and use within the recipe.
gluten aren't really associated with the mashing and fermentation process when making beer. The starches are converted to sugars that the yeast eat to make co2 and elthanol. Since the fermentation process is so long, 7 to 10 days ,the starch and sugar are gone from the grain thus the term spent. The proteins that formed any gluten were broken down by other protease enzymes that were also created during mashing. These enzymes make bread making difficult if the gluten is destroyed. So pretease in small amounts is good so the bread isn't totally rubber bands but in large amounts it is bad of all the gluten is gone.
Bread making is different in that you don't try to convert all the starch to sugar by mashing and then convert all the sugar to ethanol. What malt provides to bread are the same enzymes used to break down the starch to sugar so the yeast have something to eat, But a small amount of malt is needed, less than 1% and only for whit flour since whole grain flour have enough malt to do the job well. We aren't looking for total search and destroy initialization of the grain leaving only some weakened fiber as the end result.
Bread recipes that call for larger amounts of malt are using non diastatic malt where the enzymes have been denatured with high temperatures and these are used for color and flavor especially in rye breads - not to provide extra enzymes.
If you use the malted barley, wheat or rye in large quantities for beer making you want to heat it up to 225 F first to denature the enzymes and if you want darker color than crystal provides then you can take the temperature on up to 350 F to caramelize the sugars in the grains to kill off the enzymes.
Spent grains only provide fiber and some spent flavor to bread so, when large amounts are used in a bread recipe, the bread will be flat and there won't be enough food for the wee beasties to eat and the gluten will be less than what is required for raise a loaf. But, you can put 20- 25% of just about anything in bread if you are using high gluten flour for the rest of the mix.
Happy baking from a fellow brewer
For my part using home brew stout in bread especially with wholemeal flours is great, I started home brewing to support my habit as bottled stout can be expensive especially when making larger batches. I have used 100% stout or sometimes lesser concentrations. Stout does bring a depth of flavour that many of my friends find irresistible. I do like to use brewers grains too but these are usually sprouted and full of goodness rather than spent, they are also used whole rather than being ground. It would seem that you may have a good supply of both spent and fresh on hand. The other great experiment is as AbeNW11 suggests beer barms from the residues of brewing and the variety of different yeasts employed in brewing. regards Derek
I have a coworker who brews his own beer, and he gave me some of his spent grains to try out. As was noted by dabrownman, it's a pretty inert ingredient. I found it worked well in 'darker' recipes, like a gingerbread-style sweetened bread, since it already had cooked flavors. I also found it helped to grind it up a bit in a food processor, because the grains left a nubbly feel to the bread for any part that was too dry.
The biggest issue it gives me is that you have to dry it back out, or else it's hard to tell how much moisture content you are adding into your bread.