No-Knead Spent Grain Bread

About a month ago, I had some really good bread made using Jim Lahey’s no-knead method. The bread was really dense and chewy, and the baker said he didn’t use just flour, but threw in some other things. I thought this would be a perfect thing to attempt with spent grain.

Mind you, Amber DeGrace did publish a no-knead pizza dough which could be baked as bread, but her recipe called for a lot of oil. However, I did take her advice and use spent grain for one quarter of the flour in the original recipe.

Here’s how I ended up making my recipe (mind you, I haven’t made bread in years):

• ¾ cup spent grain
• ¾ cup rye flour that I had around
• 1 ½ cups flour
• About 1 ½ cups of water
• 1 package of baker’s yeast
• 1 teaspoons salt
• (In hind sight, it needs a tablespoon of sugar to help the yeast since the spent grain has little sugar due to it being stripped out making beer)
• Cornmeal as needed

I followed the directions, but admittedly, I covered mine with a towel and let it be for almost 24 hours. The directions said it would be covered in bubbles, but mine never got that way. Then again, I didn’t rehydrate the yeast in water, partly because the package didn’t say anything about doing that, and I figured it would have if it needed it. I thought it would require less water due to the moisture of the spent grain, but it still took the recommended amount of water to make the dough.

Again, I followed the directions, and used cornmeal to cover the loaf when it was rising for another 3 hours. It wasn’t supposed to go that long, but I got an emergency phone call, and I figured the bread could hold out another hour while I dealt with the situation. The recipe said it should double in size, but I didn’t really see that happening. I think it ran out of sugar to do so.

I put it in a glass pan with a lid to bake. The person who first introduced me to this recipe uses a cooking pot. I don’t trust any of mine to go in the oven. This glass pan seemed to do just fine. I baked it for 30 minutes with the lid on and an additional 15 minutes with the lid off.

The result was a slightly hard crust but moist bread that we really liked. We made turkey sandwiches out of it, and it was the dominate flavor. The loaf was a little flat, making it difficult for sandwiches, so either I need to increase the batch by maybe a half to better fill my pan, or find a different pan. Thing is, having something like this around makes me gain weight, so I probably won’t make it that often, so when I do, it will probably be a bigger batch rather than spend money to get a new pan.

Further reading on no-knead bread:

• My Bread: The Revolutionary No-Work, No-Knead Method by Jim Lahey
• Video of The New York Times interviewing Lahey doing a demonstration
• The New York Times does a follow up on no-knead bread FAQ
• Nutrition of the original no-knead bread recipe
• Lahey’s business: The Sullivan Street Bakery
• No-knead baguettes with goodies
• No-knead Irish brown bread
• No-knead pizza
• No-knead walnut bread
• No-knead sourdough (requires starter culture)
• No-knead bread with olives
• Baking the no-knead bread on a gas grill

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