Bread from Spent Grain

[aaronatthedoublef]

Hi,

Has anyone ever made bread from spent grain used in beer making? I have a couple friends who have opened a brewery and I'm thinking about approaching them to see if I can use their grains for bread making.

Conversely has anyone made beer from leftover bread?

I know there is info about this on the internet but I figured I could jumpstart the process here.

Thanks,

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[Mike Nolan]

Peter Reinhart has a number of recipes for spent grain breads in his whole grains book. About 10 years ago I called one of the local brewpubs and got a 5 gallon bucket of spent grain from them. (They usually just give it to local farmers to feed pigs, though they do use some of it in the bread they bring to the table and in some of the sandwiches they serve.)

I tried several spent grain bread recipes, but I think the most successful recipe I made was a variant on bran muffins. I think all the barley made for a sweet muffin. See Spent Grain Muffins

I did discover that since spent grain has a lot of hulls, sometimes it gets a bit chewy with stuff stuck between your teeth, almost like eating a bread with caraway in it. I took some of the spent grain, dried it in the oven and then ran it through the food processor to chop it up a bit, that made for a softer less toothsome bread, but it would take a lot of time to do that with a large quantity of spent grain and I don't know how long it would last after being dried. You can also run it through the food processor while its still damp, but it gets kind of messy to clean up.

From discussions I've had with others who bake with spent grains, depending on what kind of grains they're using in their beers, there's quite a bit of variability in the taste and texture of the breads made with spent grains.

Interestingly enough, there was no 'beery' flavor to any of the breads I made.

Beer makers also use a lot of different types of yeast in their beers, the local home-brew supply store must have two dozen yeast varieties, and that's just a small selection of what's available online. I don't know what impact different varieties of yeast would have on making bread, that could be a subject for a lot of experimentation.

I can't help you on using bread to make beer.

[BakerAunt]

There is a brewery-style pub restaurant in South Bend called The Evil Czech. It for a time also had a place in Culver, Indiana, where I now live. My understanding is that they used some of the spent grain from brewing to make their pizza. I never ate there, as neither my husband nor I care for beer.

The prices were also a bit high for the off-season clientele, so the owner shut it down to focus on the South Bend location. Another brewery-pub-restaurant took its place in town, but it lasted for maybe a little over a year, and the place is for sale. Again.

[Mike Nolan]

Restaurants are a high risk operation, even franchise operations for major brands like McDonalds can fail, independent restaurants, even a small chain, are even more prone to fail.

One of my professors and I did some studying of this when I was in grad school. We found that among non-franchise restaurants, fewer than 20% of them lasted as long as 5 years, and half were gone within 18 months.

There's a building near us that has been at least 5 different restaurants in the past 22 years. Most lasted 2-3 years, even the most recent attempt, a second location for one of the most popular restaurants in Lincoln, recently closed after a 4-5 year run. I think it's just a bad location. The building size and configuration may also be a problem, it's big enough that it requires a lot of covers in a day to break even.

I'm not a beer drinker, either, so it's kind of funny that for several years I was developing software for beer distributors. There's a brewpub/restaurant near us that is a second location for the place I got the spent grain from, we go there a few times a year. My older son really likes their beer cheese soup, several times he's ordered a gallon or more of it frozen and takes it back to Pittsburgh. They do some interesting breads with their spent grain, but my wife's favorite thing on their menu is the lavash pizza. Now that we've found a place to get good lavash, that'll limit the number of times we go back.

The liquor industry would go broke if it had to depend on me, and with my wife's garlic problems and low carb diet, there aren't very many local restaurants we go to on a regular basis, either. We do some fast food takeout, burgers, pizza and fried chicken mostly.

We've spent the night in South Bend a number of times when driving back and forth between Lincoln and Pittsburgh. Haven't done enough exploring of it to get away from the I-80 corridor, which may also be where a lot of the college/tourist crowd goes, so we don't know where the locals eat.

[aaronatthedoublef]

First - thanks for the assistance of spent grain. It gives me a place to start. And I think my friend will indulge me His brew master is very interested in bread. I spent an hour one evening talking with him about sourdough and why the local variations are not very sour. He likes things VERY fermented. Go figure.

As for the bread not tasting like beer, I tried using a local amber ale to make pizza dough and I could never detect any difference so I stopped using it because water is way less expensive.

Restaurants are extremely hard. I was talking with a friend (chef and COO of a four restaurant group here) about the challenges. It is only becoming harder here as we require employers to increase compensation and benefits. For someone like my friend there is no way they can drop their number of employees down without closing some stores. And there is some price elasticity but not much. So their margins shrink. And sure, these guys are doing well but they are not rich. Restaurants are the number one business to close each year. That is partly because they are also the number one business to open. But everyone thinks it's as simple as being a good cook but there is so much more to it than that. Here is a Freakonomics podcast about Kenji Alt Lopes opening a beer hall in San Mateo and all the challenges he faces.

I'll let you all know how my beer bread turns out as I progress.

[BakerAunt]

Location is definitely an issue for that restaurant. It was, until about 16 years ago, a family restaurant run by locals, and Pinder's was quite popular with the locals. They retired and sold it. The next incarnation did not last, nor did the two breweries. It is off the main part of town, so it gets missed. Also, while the local private boarding high school does bring in the parents during the school year, the season is Memorial Day to Labor Day, with some people showing up at spring break or occasionally Thanksgiving and Christmas.

The market may be saturated as well. There are two coffee shops which also serve breakfast and lunch--and one does evening meals; a very expensive new Italian restaurant with an artistic chef, another regular Italian restaurant, a cheaper Pizza place, and a larger restaurant that is across the street from the town beach/park. Oh, yes, there is a Subway in the convenience store/gas station.

We rarely eat out because we like our own cooking, and we have a wonderful view, which no local place's atmosphere can match. When we eat out, it is usually because we are away from home, as on my birthday in Florida, and if we do fast food, it is Subway, as it was yesterday after a shopping trip/car recall issue (reprogramming the media system) in South Bend. We did eat at a nice restaurant in a former mansion in South Bend last fall with my husband's cousins after we toured the Studebaker museum. They were about to open a microbrewery there in the spring.

• This reply was modified 5 years ago by BakerAunt.

[Mike Nolan]

Sourdough is a very complicated subject. The best research I've seen on it seems to indicate that the temperature at which the starter is maintained has a lot to do with how sour it gets, because some of the bacteria in the starter culture generate a lot of lactic acid and others do not. Low temperature bacteria tend to be more prone to produce higher acid concentrates, or maybe they just thrive better under high acid conditions, they're not really sure which--probably a bit of both.

Another challenge is that the bacteria present in your starter tend to adapt to your locale over time. If you buy some San Francisco starter, it will be high in a bacteria called Lactobacillus sanfranciscensis. But tests on starters that have been maintained for a year or longer tend to show that the percentage of L. sanfranciscensis goes down if you're not in San Francisco, as the local indigenous bacteria tend to dominate the sourdough culture.

My wife won't eat the local sourdoughs, they're just too sour for her, she thinks, and they bother her stomach. (I suspect that some of the bakeries, notably Panera, add acid to their dough to increase how sour it is in an attempt to make their dough taste the same regardless of location.)

Oddly enough, when we visit our son in San Francisco, she handles the sourdough breads available there just fine.

I've been tempted to try Chad Robertsons's techniques (as documented in the Tartine Bakery cookbook series) to create and maintain a less mature sourdough starter, which he says is much milder. But it involves throwing out 95% of your starter on a frequent basis.

[Mike Nolan]

I've had and made a number of breads made with beer, I can't say any of them made my top 10 favorites list. However, the spent grain I got didn't really smell much like beer, and the breads I made with it did not remind me at all of those 'beer breads', they were more like some of the ancient grains or 10 grain breads.

[Mike Nolan]

More than a few people who've tasted my breads and pastries have suggested I open a bakery. No way! Too much work, lousy hours and not all that profitable.

A second issue is that I'd probably have to change some of my recipes to make the products affordable, I once figured my costs for my deep dish apple pie at about $6.00. If I follow the usual restaurant rule (selling price is 3-4 X the cost of the ingredients), that means charging anywhere from $18 to $24 per pie. I suspect not enough people would buy them, especially when most of the apple pies available locally are $10 or less.

[aaronatthedoublef]

My limited experience working in bakeries taught me you need to develop a wholesale business in addition to retail. This is a huge challenge because your baking on a much bigger scale than your bakery was setup to do. I've worked in and seen this twice and one of the bakeries was successful and one failed but that was because of the owner. The failed bakery was purchased as a second location for another bakery and is thriving because the owner is smarter and trusts her employees.

The couple of bakeries I've seen here (I'm in the process of going to see if I can work in yet another one) that make sourdough don't begin from starters. They mix the dough and let if rest in the refrigerator but the rest is usually only about 12 hours, if that. It won't really develop any fermentation in that time in a refrigerator. It doesn't even have a soft tang but the flavor is deeper than a standard one hour rise on the counter. The owner and his head bread baker insisted that there is not the market for real sourdough here but at least part of it is that they didn't want to spend three days making a loaf of bread. And I don't know how the health department would react to them leaving out huge amounts of dough for 24 hours or more but that appears to be what Jim Lahey does in NY (I've never tasted his bread but a trip to one of his shops is on my list). I've never made my own starter because my wife would be disturbed by the science project growing on the counter. But, she is behind the spent grain idea so perhaps it's time to approach this topic again.

I make pizza dough every other week. I used to let it rise in the refrigerator but I needed at least two days in there. Now I let it rise on the counter but I still need at least 18 before it starts to have the right taste and 24 is better. If I let it go longer than 24 it goes in the fridge.

[Mike Nolan]

As long as it is properly covered so it isn't exposed, I think the health department is OK with sourdough starters at room temperature, or at least they are in Nebraska.

I get the impression from Anthony Bourdain's books, especially his first one, that NYC rules are similar.

[BakerAunt]

Aaron--I came across this article on spent grain bread and thought of you.

https://madison.com/wsj/entertainment/dining/restaurants/bakery-brewery-partnership-yields-bread-made-from-spent-grain/article_466b0833-c9c7-5dcf-8f18-eb9a795ea9a3.html

The bread does look delicious!

[aaronatthedoublef]

Thanks BA!

[Mike Nolan]

The article doesn't mention it, but I found that spent grain needed to be ground up a bit as the stuff I had consisted largely of hulls from the barley and, I guess, the hops.

But the bran muffins I made with spent grain were some of the best I've ever had, and the barley made them naturally sweet.

[aaronatthedoublef]

Thanks Mike. Do you think I could use a food processor to grind it up?

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