Baking Challenge Week 36 - Apples - Apple Spent-Grain Muffins

Bad muffins don't get pretty pictures.  They're not worth the trouble.

The husband and I brewed up a new batch of beer last weekend, so I had a big tub of spent grain to play with.  I've done bread and pizza crust, so this time I thought I'd tackle muffins.

I started with my favorite oat bran muffin recipe, figuring that I could sub out the oat bran for the grain, which worked pretty well.  I threw a chopped Red Delicious apple into the batter to give it more sweetness and some texture.

Oops!  Red Delicious apples bake away to squishy blobs of nothing.  I gave it texture, alright--bad texture.

The consistency of the muffin itself is fine: moist and dense without being heavy.  The flavor is a little bland--I can't decide if it needs more sugar, salt, or both.  But the blobs of squishy apple just ruin it.

The cooking challenge #36 is apples too, but I have a foolproof plan there, my favorite savory apple application that has never, ever failed me.  I will redeem myself!

Cooking Challenge Week 26 (Late!) - Pizza - Bacon and Portobello Mushrooms on a Spent-Grain Crust

  

The general how-to is easy.  Be a homebrewer, have spent grain from your last batch of beer, and mix some in your favorite pizza crust recipe.

The actual how-to is a little more complicated.  I like this recipe, but a single batch isn't enough to cover my baking sheet, so I've taken to making a quadruple batch but only dividing the dough into thirds to get the right coverage.  (I freeze the other two for later.)  Judging by other spent-grain pizza crust recipes, they mostly use less than half as much grain by volume as flour, so I added 2/3 cup per 'batch', for a total of 2 2/3 cups grain.  The texture seemed good, I don't think it really needs more.

Top with sauce, cheese, and fixin's, and bake at 450 F for 16-18 minutes.

Cooking Challenge Week 9 - Coffee - Spent-Grain Russian Black Bread

I don't like coffee.  I don't like a lot of bitter things in general--I'm only recently learning to like beer!--but even in its sweeter forms, coffee's flavor just doesn't appeal to me.

Fortunately, there's plenty you can do with coffee besides drink it.

There are also a few things you can do with the grain leftover from the beer-brewing process.  One of the most popular, apparently, is dog treats; but we have no canine companions.  Next on the list is spent-grain bread.  Our most recent batch of beer, a lovely milk stout, gave me enough spent grain for two batches of this wonderful bread.  It's moist, pleasantly chewy, incredibly flavorful...and the recipe calls for coffee.

Bingo!
  
I can't take credit for this recipe in the slightest--I found it over at r/Homebrewing.  I did, however, clean it up a little, and included my coffee-to-water proportions, the original isn't as easy to follow...

Spent-Grain Russian Black Bread
(makes about 4 lbs bread in total, loaves will vary with shaping)

• 1 1/2 tbsp active dry yeast
• 1 cup warm water
• 3 to 4 cups bread flour (will depend on the wetness of your grains)
• 2 cups spent grain
• 1 tbsp sugar
• 1 tbsp salt
• 1 tbsp cocoa powder
• dash onion powder
• 1 1/2 cups brewed coffee
• 1/2 cup dark molasses
• 1/4 cup olive oil
• 3 cups rye flour
• more bread flour, as needed, for kneading and shaping

Proof the yeast in the warm water for 5-10 minutes, until foamy.  In the largest bowl you have, combine the bread flour, spent grain, sugar, salt, cocoa powder, and onion powder.  Add the proofed yeast and mix well.

In a small saucepan, combine the coffee, molasses, and olive oil.  Cook over low heat, stirring, just until the molasses is fully incorporated.  Stir into the flour mixture.

Add the rye flour, one cup at a time, stirring to form a dough.  (If your grains were rather wet, you might need to add more bread flour now to get a workable dough; if they were fairly dry, you might not need all the rye flour, in which case, use the rest of it for kneading and shaping.)

Turn the dough out onto a floured surface and knead for five minutes.  Let the dough rise until doubled (about one hour), then punch down and shape into desired loaves.  (I tried two braids to be fancy, but really, this is a wet dough and too soft to hold a well-defined freeform shape.  Stick to something simple.)  Let rise again 45 minutes to an hour.

Bake at 375 F for 40-45 minutes, until the bread sounds hollow when tapped on the bottom.

An Exercise in Patience - My First Attempt at Home Winemaking

My husband is big on beer.  Beer is one of the things Michigan does well; we have a dizzying array of excellent craft breweries.  Taking this interest a step farther, a little over a year ago, he started brewing his own, with pretty damn fabulous results.  The latest batch was a milk stout, and boy, will I be sad when that last bottle is gone.

Now, originally, I hadn't intended to get caught up in it myself.   But being his brewer's assistant was fun, and when we'd go to the local home brewing supply, I would find myself picking up this book on unusual wines over and over again to browse through while he was deciding what to get for his next batch.

So I bought it, and for Christmas got myself set up with the few things I'd need that we didn't already have, and off I went!

My first effort is an almond wine, started by cooking a sludge of water, chopped almonds, and pulverized golden raisins.  It gave off some intriguing smells, but it looked pretty strange.

Strain that, let it cool, add the yeast, and into a bucket to ferment for ten days.  That was eleven days ago--yesterday was the first racking day.  Racking is the process that siphons the fermenting wine off of its sediment into a new container, and (apparently) this needs to be done quite a few times during the fermentation process; prolonged exposure to the dead yeast that settles out can damage the flavor of the wine.  Makes sense, right?

Racking day went smoothly, which makes me quite pleased, because I'm going to do it again in a month.  And a month after that, and after that, on until the wine is clear instead of murky, and our trusty hydrometer tells me that it is wine instead of fruit juice.

Speaking of fruit juice--the recipe called for grape juice concentrate.  The wine is now pink because the recipe wasn't specific on which kind...and I, unthinkingly, grabbed regular grape juice instead of white.  A strong purple added to a lovely gold apparently produces this, a sort of sickly brownish pink.  It's in my notes never to make that mistake again!

Now that my fermenting bucket is empty, I get the daunting task of deciding which wine to start next!