spent grain adventures

The oven has been set to 425° for most of the day.

The day began with a fun new recipe from Erik at topfermented.com As I wrote about the other day, it takes the style from my most used bread book (Artisan Bread in 5 minutes a Day) and adds the fun of using spent grains.

Phase one: Dry ingredients with the spent grain. (The grains in both of today's recipes are from Northern Brewer Dead Ringer IPA.)

After you add the water it looks a little something like this:

Then you go for a 7.5 mile run....well, it's not required, but it was a good day for a distance run and it did help pass the time that was necessary for the dough to rise and it was much better than cleaning the house.

2 hours (not just spent running) later:

At this point I took half of it for a loaf and then it chilled on the pizza peel for a while while the oven preheated.

Into the oven for about 35 minutes and this is the beauty that came out:

It was hard to wait until it really, really cooled, because I was uber hungry....but I did manage to wait a little while.  It was a great post run treat with peanut butter and honey.  Then later it was good with sharp cheddar cheese and honey.  (My long distance run days mean lots of snacking with interesting flavor combinations.)

Then came the cookies!

Thank you Omnomicon for this tasty recipe.  Apparently I was much more into mixing than picture taking for this project.

But after it was all mixed this is what it looked like.

Talk about a hearty cookie.

Here's the recipe as posted on Omnomicon's page:

• Nutty Spent Grain Chocolate Chip Cookies

"Adapted from a recipe featured by Seven Bridges Cooperative.
1/3 cup peanut butter
2 tbsp melted butter
1 cup sugar
1/3 cup milk
1 tsp vanilla
1.5 cups spent grains (or alternatively, 1.5 cups of your favourite grain meal, prepared and still wet)
2 cups whole wheat flour
1 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 cup chocolate chips
1/2 cup chopped nuts
Mix in the peanut butter, regular butter, sugar, milk and vanilla. Then add the flour, baking soda and salt. Once that’s all mixed, stir in the nuts and chips.
Bake on a greased cookie sheet at 425F for 8-10 minutes until the tops are just getting golden, but before the bottoms burn. Let sit on the pan for about five minutes before transferring to wire rack to cool. Serve with love.

Makes about 2 dozen cookies after batter sampling."

They are super delicious and I didn't even add the chopped nuts....I just added extra chocolate chips :)  But I have deemed them a great post run snack....they would've been excellent with a glass of chocolate milk!

My sous chef kept a close eye on the cookie production. 

And this is the post cookie aftermath...

And here they are baked :)

So delicious!!!

And that is the end of today's spent grain adventures....tomorrow's will probably consist of drying out the rest of the grains from the Dead Ringer....it seems like it has expanded since it thawed and came out of the mesh bag.

All in all both of today's recipes were winners.  I think I'll play with the additions to the cookies...and after some of the grain is dried out, I'll grind it and add it to other bread recipes that I've been tweaking.

So, the sous chef put in a tough day....

I could totally follow suit.

Until tomorrow . . .