Swedish rye and Kölsch spent grain bread

For the first time in many months, I made Hensperger's Swedish rye bread (p. 136). I also made a spent grain bread, using still warm grains and some barley syrup left over from my husband's latest brew.

I made the following adjustments to the Swedish rye recipe:

• Reduced salt to less than 3/4 teaspoon (maybe 1/2 teaspoon; I didn't measure precisely).
• Reduced yeast to a scant 1.5 teaspoons.
• Reduced gluten to 1 T (mostly because I couldn't be bothered to find a clean teaspoon measure).
• Used organic safflower oil and TJ's multi-floral and clover honey (northern U.S.).

As I have been doing lately, I put the oil, honey, and salt in with the water. I didn't want to stay up until 2:30 a.m. for this bread to cook, so I put it on a delay timer for 9 a.m.

I denuded a huge orange for this bread.

The bread smelled great the next morning. It looked pretty good, too, if a little lumpy.

Rorschach test: What does this bread look like?

Most importantly, the Swedish rye bread smelled and tasted really good. We didn't quite finish it, but we sawed quite a bit of it away before abandoning it.

Next, I baked the same spent grain recipe I've been making for a while, but with leftovers from brewing Kölsch ale. I even scraped the malt syrup jar so I could use liquid malt extract instead of honey. Here are the details:

• Instead of 2T honey, I used 2T barley syrup (which was half Pilsen and half Munich).
• The spent grain (3/4 cup) was half white wheat malt and half crystal 10°L.
• The 2T of oil was safflower (organic), instead of olive, because I wanted to taste the grain and barley.
• As before, the first things into the bread pan were the spent grain, oil, syrup, salt (3/4 t), and a scant cup of water.
• As before, I used 2-1/4 c bread flour, 3/4 c whole wheat flour, and 1t bread machine yeast.
• The rising bread was way over on one paddle's side, so I picked it up early and redistributed it.

Spent grain going into the bread pan

The bread came out looking pretty good.

Lighter than the other breads, as you'd expect given the grains

The taste of the bread was good, but I wasn't crazy about the texture. The bread was soft, like a buttermilk or potato bread. That didn't bother my husband, who ate a bunch of it the night it was baked.

I didn't notice the pyramidal shape of this loaf right away,
so I suspect it got squeezed at the top when it was first sliced.

If I can find any malt syrup, I might make this bread again, doing everything the same except changing the crust control to dark.