A celebration of beer: Spent grains bread

To celebrate my housemate's birthday my recent baking experiment was a number of beer-inspired breads.

The most popular was one that combined spent grains from my local craft brewery, Young Henrys, with some beer that had been leftover at the bottom of a growler of Batch beer, another local brewery, for a bit too long to be interesting to drink. My part of Sydney is a great place to live!

I took an idea from Dan Lepard's Handmade Loaf and made a "quicker barm" by heating 125g Batch beer then whisking in 25g white flour. To this I added 97g spent grains and (when cool enough) a couple of teaspoons of NMNF starter that had finished its second build. I left this overnight to ferment.

In the morning my "quicker barm" smelt amazing. I mixed it with 250g water, 500g white flour, 10g salt.

There aren't any flours specially for bread available at my local shops. However, I recently joined a fruit and veg delivery scheme that has various organic, stoneground flours available from Demeter Farm Mill in NSW. Stay tuned for a review!

In the meantime, I use "Black & Gold" plain flour, which is effectively no-name brand. Its protein content is 10.9%, which is higher than others that are marketed as "premium" plain flour. I once read that there's no real difference in quality between plain (all purpose) flours that are available in most supermarkets. I'd be interested to hear from any Australian bakers whether they notice a difference.

I didn't note down the exact timeline from here. I followed my usual practice of doing a few stretch and folds over a few hours during the bulk ferment, then shaped into a batard, gave it another couple of hours, and baked for about 40 minutes at 230 C (higher for the first 10 minutes).

To create steam and help with oven spring, I poured about half a cup of boiling water into a baking tray, which I put on the bottom shelf of the oven; and I sprayed the top of the loaf and sides of the oven with water.

The result was a very tasty loaf! My housemate recommended it as a base for lamb or cheese sandwiches... but I'm vegan, so I enjoyed a slice or two with vegemite - another excellent by-product of beer making. Cheers!