Celebration ale spent grain bread

Last weekend my husband brewed Oak Barrel Winecraft's seasonal Celebration Ale, which features 1 part barley to 2 parts crystal malt 40L. It also includes sugars and spices, but I'm not sure how much of those made their way into the grains.

So what the heck is crystal malt 40L? According to Brew365, it's a type of crystal/caramel malt produced from wheat rather than barley. "The process darkens the wheat malt (from 3L to 38-53L) and produces nonfermentable sugars. The roasting process produces a caramel, roast, moderately sweet flavor in addition to keeping the mouthfeel properties of the base wheat malt." It's used in dark beers. Judging from the range of 38-53L, it sounds like crystal malt 40L is one of the lighter dark wheat malts.

Barley and crystal malt 40L, after brewing

After brewing, the spent grain smelled much less sweet than the Hefeweizen leftovers. This spent grain did, however, make for some tasty, dark bread. I'll call it Celebration bread.

Dense crumb around the edges

I used the same recipe as before: Snappy Service Cafe's Homebrewed to Home Baked: Spent Grain Bread. The only difference from before was the different spent grain and the fact that I accidentally left the bread in the breadmaker for a few hours after baking. The extended time in the Zo didn't seem to harm the Celebration bread, but it might have contributed to the dense crumb along all the outside edges of the bread.

Although I made the same adjustments as before (search for "details" in my previous post), the Celebration bread had a very different texture, color, and flavor from the Hefeweizen bread. The texture wasn't as light, perhaps because of being trapped in the breadmaker. During the mixing cycle, I checked on the consistency, and it was more solid (in a good way) than the wetter Hefeweizen dough. The color of the Celebration bread was darker, more like a pumpernickel. Interestingly, the flavor was also more like pumpernickel—bittersweet, with molasses overtones. Each time I had the Celebration bread, the first bite seemed a little too bitter, but by the last bite I loved it.

I ate the Celebration bread both alone and with tuna fish. Delicious!

Next time I might try a different oil. I'll probably also reduce the recipe to produce something closer to a 1.5# loaf. This bread was ridiculously tall. Never before have I made a machine-baked loaf that barely fit into the breadbox.

Squeezed into the breadbox

Fail breads, great brownies, and more

It's been a while since I posted, in part because it's no fun to talk about failures. Here's what's happened since I last posted:

• I forgot to put salt into a sourdough poppy-sesame seed loaf (which I'd never made before).
• I didn't seat the bread pan well, ruining a sourdough buckwheat loaf (which I'd successfully made before).
• I made a pretty good rye bread from a new (to me) cookbook.
• I successfully made super lemon ice cream and chunky raspberry sauce (which I'd made a few times before, but not recently).
• I found a delicious brownie recipe that features coconut flour, and I made it twice.

Salt. It's the reason I started baking bread. I can't take too much sodium, and most bread has an awful lot of it. So I bake bread with about half the salt the recipes call for (halving the yeast as well), and it usually turns out.

Without salt, bread tastes anywhere from boring to downright nasty. The sourdough poppy-sesame bread tasted nasty. I can't be sure that leaving out the salt was the only reason for this bread's failure, since I'd never made the bread before (much less any recipes from Josey Baker Bread's sourdough section). Here are the problems with the bread:

• Nasty flavor, making the bread inedible. (Lack of salt was definitely a factor. It's also possible that the poppy seeds were bad.)
• Failure to develop gluten. The bread stayed wet, the gluten never seeming to develop. (Kneading helps gluten and this was a low-knead recipe, but so is the sesame bread that I've made successfully a few times. Salt makes gluten stickier and stronger, which is what you want in yeast-raised bread. More info: Fine Cooking's article about how to increase or limit gluten development.)
• Failure to rise in the oven. (This might have been as least partly because I didn't preheat the baking stone for a full 45 minutes; I was in a hurry.)

Here's what the dough looked like when it was supposedly ready to shape:

Here's the outside of the cooked loaf:

Not undercooked (nor overcooked)

Here's what it looked like inside:

Enough of that. I didn't take a picture of the failed sourdough buckwheat loaf, so I'll just describe it. Imagine a tiny ball of bread around one paddle, and a big lump around the other paddle. The tiny ball was hard, the other one seemed a bit compressed, and together they were smaller than when I successfully cooked this bread before. I threw out the bread without eating it.

If I ever hear the bread machine making a racket again, I'll restart the cycle from the beginning, rather than reseating the bread pan and letting it continue.

Here's the rye bread, which was from the Raisin Pumpernickel recipe in Rustic European Breads from Your Bread Machine, by Linda West Eckhardt and Diana Collingwood Butts (p. 175). I took the caraway seed option instead of raisins. I probably halved the salt and yeast... I don't remember.

My first slice attempted was timid, so I sliced again
(as you can see from the curvy line at the top left)

I messed up on the baking a bit, forgetting to decrease the heat from the 400 degree preheat to a 375 degree baking heat. Strangely, the instructions say to bake it "until done...or until golden brown and done through." How are you supposed to know that a dark brown bread is golden brown? I sense cut and paste.

I shaped the dough as a free loaf, covering it for the first 20 minutes of baking. If I make this bread again, I might just use a loaf pan, since the bread crust didn't stay crisp for long. And if it comes to that, why not just bake it in the bread machine?

Here's a picture of the inside.

 Great with tomato, mozzarella, basil, and olive oil!

Changing the subject to ice cream, I made super lemon ice cream with chunky raspberry sauce, from recipes in The Perfect Scoop. I'd gotten a request for birthday ice cream the same morning. For most of the ice creams I make, this would be a problem, since I usually cook one day and then churn the next (so the custard is completely cool). I chose this recipe because it's tasty and it requires no cooking.

As usual, I used lemons from the garden.

You whir up the lemon zest with some sugar, and then you add half and half.

The raspberry sauce was also good, as always.

Ingredients for the chunky raspberry sauce

Finally, the brownie recipe. It's on the back of the Let's Do... Organic Coconut Flour package, and it's very similar to a King Arthur chocolate coconut cake recipe. Moist, deliciously chocolatey... it's a winner. It's gluten free (whatever) but definitely not low in cholesterol or fat—lots of eggs and butter.

I've made these brownies twice, both times adding chocolate chips. The brownies are OK cold, but they're great room temperature or warm. When I make them again, I'd like to try adding nuts or cocoa nibs—with or without chocolate chips.

Redemption of a fallen pumpernickel

I love pumpernickel bread, although I didn't know that until I started baking it for myself, using Zojirushi's recipe.

A big, delicious loaf of Zo pumpernickel

I'm not crazy about caraway seeds, but since my honey is, I decided to try a recipe in The Bread Lover's Bread Machine Cookbook (which I'll just call Hensperger, after its author). It's called Bohemian black bread (BBB), and it's a pumpernickel with fennel and caraway.

At first, the bread was a flop. Neither of us liked the flavor much, plus the bread fell! I've never had this problem before, despite all my messing around with the amount of yeast and salt. The bread is perfectly light, so I assume the problem was too much yeast for the amount of salt.

A fallen loaf of Bohemian black bread

The second day, however, both of us really liked the bread. (The recipe had said it was better the second day. Maybe it's because the fennel mellows.) We tried the bread various ways—with olive oil and mustard, plain with a slice of ham, topped with tuna fish salad, toasted with peanut butter and jam—and the combinations were delicious! For some reason, this bread was also easier to slice than the others I've made, so I could eat thinner slices.

Thin slices of the BBB

Since I've successfully cooked Zo's pumpernickel every time I've tried, here are some notes comparing the recipes (or, to be precise, my interpretation of the recipes). I cooked both breads using the delay timer and the whole wheat setting.

Things that are similar:

• The liquid: both use water (though Zo uses a bit less)
• The sweetener: both use molasses (though Zo uses more)
• The coloring: both use cocoa and coffee (though BBB uses more cocoa)
• The main flours: both use about 2 cups of bread flour, and about a cup of rye flour
• Salt: both call for 2 teaspoons, though I used just a pinch for the Zo and maybe 3/4 t for the BBB

Things that are different:

• The fat: Zo uses oil; BBB uses butter (and twice as much, by volume)
• Other flours: Zo uses some whole wheat flour plus a bit of cornmeal; BBB just uses a bit of wheat bran
• Gluten: Zo uses almost 3 times as much
• Seeds: Zo uses none; BBB uses some caraway (though less than in the book's Scandinavian light rye recipe) and a bit of fennel
• Yeast: Zo calls for 2 tsp (I used 1 heaping tsp); BBB calls for 1 T (I used 2 scant tsp)

Other things that might have made a difference:

• I used dark rye for BBB instead of the rye flour I usually use
• I used black cocoa for BBB instead of the regular dutch process I usually use

I might make the recipe again. It's not the best standalone bread, but (on the second day, at least) it combines really well with other flavors. If I make it again, I'll try lowering the yeast to 1 heaping tsp. Or I might just make the Zo recipe, but add caraway.

Goodbye old Zojirushi, hello new Zojirushi

I have a new bread machine! The old one was great the few times that it worked, but its single paddle soon stopped stirring at all. As I blogged before, the result was layered flour bricks like these:

  

If I stirred everything ahead of time, I could still use the machine to bake, which came in handy when my oven broke and I wanted to cook cornbread.

Thanks to the few times the old machine did work, I decided to buy myself a brand new Zojirushi.

Zojirushi Home Bakery Virtuoso (BB-PAC20)

I considered getting a machine that had an automatic dispensing tray for raisins or nuts, but that tray wasn't very big, and the machine just didn't sound as good.

The new machine has a few improvements over the old one, such one:

• 2 mixing paddles instead of 1
• Bigger capacity
• Horizontal loaf rather than vertical

Here's what the new bread machine is producing:

Whole-wheat walnut bread

Whole-wheat and white, cooked with a timer

Pumpernickel, cooked with a timer

By the way, the pumpernickel is delicious. (Who knew that the dark color comes from coffee and cocoa? Crazy!) I used the Zojirushi recipe but reduced the salt to a pinch and the yeast to just over a teaspoon. I made similar adjustments to the other Zojirushi recipes.

The latest bread I tried was a pull-apart honey whole-wheat, using a recipe from Hensberger's Bread Machine Cookbook and techniques from the Zojirushi cookbook's weird, "home made variations" recipe for "party bread". This was a trial run for Thanksgiving dinner rolls. I want to cook them in the bread machine, if possible, so they'll be ultra-fresh and we won't have to use the oven for anything but turkey. Plus, you know, it'll be cool.

The remains of the honey whole-wheat

First, let me say that the bread was tasty. I don't know how well it'll keep, but since it's mostly gone, who cares. I made the 1-1/2 pound loaf recipe, reducing the salt to 1/2 teaspoon and yeast to 2 teaspoons.

Second, although the Zojirushi recipe is very unclear and incomplete, it worked better than I expected. The loaf, created from 15 mini-balls of dough, was fairly easy to pull apart, despite having no flour or cornmeal or oil/butter to keep the mini-balls from sticking to each other. I guess the mini-balls' little private rising time helped.

Third, although the Zo recipe calls for embedding sausage, chocolate, or cream cheese in each piece, I had nothing savory to put in them. I did, however, put a TJ's speculoos chocolate cup in one, just to see what would happen.  It was a bit messy, melting into a spreading puddle that my husband and I gleefully chased down. Perhaps chocolate chips might work better, since they supposedly don't melt as well. However, for dinner rolls I'd stick with savory fillings, if any.

By the way, the Hensberger book is one of several that my friend Shams recently gave to me. Thanks, Shams!