For the Love of Bread

Normally I love to bake and cook but the last six months or so my love of the culinary arts has been on an extended vacation. At the top of my list of food favs is bread. Especially of the homemade sort. At times, I eat enough carbs to make a South Beach dieter pass out with envy (or maybe it is fear). I am getting my groove back on though.

Watching Chuck pitch two tons of spent beer grains in the compost woke something up in my mind. He had already dashed my hopes and dreams of using the leftover yeast cake for bread. Turns out that the beer yeast and the bread yeast are different. Go figure. But the grains! The grains are still usable, right? We shall see.

I took a basic bread sponge recipe from "Baking with Julia" and altered it a bit. The sponge will rise on the counter for 4-5 hours and then rest overnight in the fridge. Hopefully by tomorrow it will smell yummy, yeasty and much less like a feed bucket.

Sponge Recipe
1c spent grains
1c water
1c fresh ground Golden 86 wheat flour
2t sugar
2.5tsp yeast
-add water and spent grains to the blender until they are as smooth as you wish.
-dump into a big honkin bowl and stir in the rest of the items by hand.
-give it a good sniff because you know you wanna see what horse grains smell like
-cover with plastic wrap and allow to rise on the counter