Spent Grain Cooking and Baking

So, I’ve been brewing again, which means I’ve been producing spent grains again. I don’t like to waste the grains, but disposing of them has become difficult. Until the spring, I was able to hand them over to my friend Mark, who has a worm farm and who used to sun-dry the grains to use them for worm farm bedding. However, after the Housing Office where we live decided to deem that, on the basis of the temporary (and, really, not so bad) smell outside the building, this practice was “harmful to other people.” (This is pretty laughable, given the …

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Made, Chez Nous

So this morning, I made some bread: Crusty dinner buns, to be exact. They’re not perfect, or even as good as the first time I made them (for a burger dinner, when they turned out amazing!) but I’m pretty pleased with them. I’ll be digging into Peter Reinhart’s book The Bread Maker’s Apprentice this month, which I expect will give me some of the knowledge and skills to build on making bread the way I want a little more effectively — darker, crustier, lighter, fluffier, and so on. I figure I’m limited by my small toaster oven, but that’s all …

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Not Quite Sourdough, But It Rose

I made some bread today, my 2nd try at making bread with Brettanomyces Claussenii yeast. Brett C. is, as you may know, a strain of wild yeast of the kind used in some kinds of brewing, and I brewed a beer using it as my sole yeast back in late October of this year. (It’s been in the bottle a week and I plan on testing out a small bottle this afternoon, to see if the carbonation is where I’d like it to be.) Anyway, I saw that The Mad Fermentationist had made some baguettes with a strain of Brett, …

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