ancient sprouted wheat bread

We have a bag of wheatberries that we've been trying to use up. I found a recipe for bread that uses sprouted wheatberries and that's all–no yeast, no extra water, no extra flour. The recipe is from Mother Earth News and we've been calling it "ancient grain bread."

To make it, you sprout wheatberries in a large jar:


Grind the sprouted wheatberries (we used a hand crank meat grinder):



Form into a log and bake for 2.5 hours at 250ºF. The result is a sweet and chewy bread that goes well with salted butter:


Full instructions can be found at Mother Earth News.

white bean spread with young radicchio

I was all ready to mark this down as another entry in the Dark Days Challenge, but then realized that we are no longer living in the dark days! The farmers' market has been going for several weeks and we recently picked up some large white beans and some young radicchio, among other things.

Loosely following this recipe, I blended the cooked beans, olive oil, garlic, lemon juice, dried basil, salt, and pepper in a food processor and spread it on some homemade chive bread and topped it with chopped up young radicchio leaves in a balsamic vinaigrette.

Pretty tasty, but I think next time I'll leave the beans chunkier for a texture more like bruschetta.

eric's super vegan stuffing

Stuffing is one of my faves. I think this stuffing came out really good. The secret? frying the bread cubes in margarine. Also, I used two types of bread--one a cranberry walnut bread--for added interest and texture.

Ingredients:
10 c. bread cubes (4 c. cranberry walnut, 6 c. sourdough/white)
at least a cup of margarine
a few stalks celery
1 carrot
1 small onion
1 apple (granny smith) (diced into small pieces)
1/2 c. dried cranberries
1 c. walnuts
2 t. sage
2 t. thyme
1 t. salt
black pepper
2 T. apple cider vinegar
2 c. veg. broth
1 T. vegetarian mushroom oyster sauce
sugar (for candying walnuts)

First, make your bread cubes. Then melt 1/2 c. or so of the margarine and fry the bread cubes until they are crispy and golden (you may have to do this in two batches).

Second, cook the celery, onion, and carrot in margarine until soft. Add the sage, thyme, salt, and pepper, followed by the fried bread cubes, cranberries, and apple (diced into small pieces). Mix well.

Break the walnuts into pieces and toast them in a little bit of oil, adding sugar so they get caramelized. Add half of them to the bread cube mixture, and save the other half to sprinkle on top.

Heat up the vegetable broth and add the apple cider vinegar and mushroom sauce, mixing until dissolves. Pour this over the bread cube mixture and mix until the broth has been soaked up by the bread cubes. Transfer to a baking container. I used two loaf pans, which kept the whole thing from drying out too much, yet allowed the top to get nice and crispy. A casserole dish would work fine also.

Sprinkle the rest of the candied walnuts on top and bake for 15-30 min at 425°F.

sourdough starter

I recently purchase sourdough starter in a silent auction. You can start sourdough on your own just by letting flour and water sit out to absorb whatever wild yeast spores are in the air. We've done that before but we gave up because the flavor wasn't all that impressive. The sourdough starter that I purchased in the silent auction, however, has a delicious smell. It must be pretty resilient too because it is said to be 150 years old!

Today I used it to make a sourdough rye bread. Yum yum yum yummm... Excuse me while I get back to eating the entire loaf.

ipa yeastcake bread

We transferred our IPA to a secondary fermenter and I decided to try using the leftover yeast cake to make some bread. I just added some flour and water to the yeastcake to make it into a sponge (I added some bread yeast too), which I fermented until I felt like making bread. It doesn't have much of a hop aroma because this was before dry-hopping, but it is sooo bitter! ...and tasty, especially with marg and honey.

I also saved the hops for future experiments. Got any good recipes for reusing homebrew hops?

spent cranberry crumble and bread

In continuation of my obsession of using "spent" or used beer brewing ingredients, here is a crumble that uses the cranberry mush leftover from our recently bottled Christmas Dinner Cranberry Porter. I also threw in a chunk of frozen pumpkin puree and some crabapple syrup that was canned in the summer.

In the background, you can see my cranberry walnut bread. I followed Rose Levy Beranbaum's recipe and just kneaded in as much cranberry mush as I could. It is pretty dense because I ran out of all-purpose flour and substituted locally stone-ground whole-wheat.

spent grain bread

Here is another use for spent grain from beer brewing. Check out the swirl made by the dark malts! The bread and the pancakes both used small amounts of spent grain for flavoring, but they aren't a good way to use up large quantities. We still have a lot of grain left--almost 3 lbs. If we were doing all-grain brewing, I would want to find some animals to feed it to or try using it to grow mushrooms.

I found the bread recipe here. The recipe called for 32 oz. of beer, but who wants to waste beer when there's spent grain to use?

Makes 2 large loaves or 1 extra-large loaf.

Ingredients:

2 1/4 lbs. unbleached all-purpose flour (8 3/4 c.)

10 1/2 oz. whole wheat flour (2 1/2 c.)

32 oz. water

2 t. instant yeast

1 oz. salt (1 1/2 T.)

7 oz. wet mash "spent grain", not pureed (2 c.)

Fold in the spent grain after kneading and before rising. Otherwise do the normal bread making things.