2025.06.08 Spent Grain Honey Bread

2025.06.08 - Spent Grain Honey Bread

My partner Armand and I spent the day making beerios, which is beer made with cheerios, from a base honey wheat and mixed grains recipe.

After we simmered the grains (wheat, barley, oats, etc.) for all their sugars to feed the beer yeast (creating the "beer tea"), we were left with a lot of "spent grain," the leftover fiber-rich, protein-heavy bits of the simmered grains. Rather than throwing it away, I made bread out of it. 

I didn't really have a solid source for this recipe. I just mostly know how to make bread. So I credit the dozens of recipes I have read.

Ingredients: (This recipe makes a LOT of bread, but I sized it to how much spent grain I had)

~6 cups of water that might be part "beer tea"

~4 tablespoons of very old bread yeast - I would not have used nearly this much if it was new yeast

1 roundish tablespoon of white sugar

1 cup of unfiltered honey, divided (2/3ish cup for the bowl, 1/3ish cup for the glaze)

2/3 cup of olive oil, divided (1/3ish cup for the bowl, 1/3ish cup for the glaze)

2 tablespoons of salt

~6 cups of wet spent grains, strained of their "beer tea" and still warm from simmering

~14 cups of King Arthur all purpose flour, divided (~10-12 cups for the bowl, the rest for kneading)

Process: 

I put the water and yeast in a big bowl and then threw in the white sugar for the yeast to eat until it is foamy, about 10 minutes. 

I put all the other ingredients in the bowl in no particular order, mixing with a big spoon as I went.

I left the ingredients in the bowl with a wet towel on top for about an hour to rise. 

I heavily floured a clean surface and my clean hands. 

I punched the risen dough down and scooped out handful-sized portions of the dough at a time. It is important that your hands are heavily floured.

I kneaded and triple-folded each portion of dough on the heavily floured surface for a minute until I felt like it was no longer super sticky but also not crumbly-dry.

I sort of pushed the dough through a hole I made with my hands to make a round shape that didn't have wrinkles. Kind of like how you form mozzarella, if you have seen that before. 

I put the balls of dough on waxed paper and covered them completely with a damp towel to rise a second time. 

I preheated my oven to 350 Fahrenheit. 

When the first balls of dough I had rolled out had been rising for about 30 minutes, I took the reserved honey and olive oil, mixed it in a little bowl, and then brushed some the mixture onto the tops of my dough balls to form a sort of sweet glaze. I put this glaze on each batch right before it went into the oven.

I put this first glazed batch in the oven right after, when they had been rising only 30 minutes. 

The 30 minutes was not long enough for them to fully rise and I knew this, but I needed to get a cycle going because it was not possible to bake all the bread at the same time in the oven and I didn't want the rest of the bread to over-proof while I waited the full time. I have two baking sheets and two racks in my oven, so I baked them on a cycle.

I waited until this first batch had been baking for a half hour, then I put another batch in with them, so there was two batches in the oven, one half done and one just starting. 

At the hour mark of bread being in the oven, I pulled out the first batch that had been baking for the whole hour, then I put in a new batch to replace them. At this point I had one batch of finished bread pulled out of the oven, one half-done batch in the oven, and one new batch in the oven. 

In this manner I kept going until all of the dough was cooked. It took about six rounds, but I experimented with the sizes and techniques of the dough balls, so some took longer than others. I baked them until they didn't look wet anymore, and the top was well-browned. 1 hour per handful-sized-scoop loaf was the bare minimum - I left them in longer, honestly, until I felt like they were done. With only 1 hour they would have been a bit gummy. 1 hour per palm-sized-scoop loaf was pretty spot on.

Results: 

I shared the first loaf with my partner Armand right out of the oven, with butter and a pinch of salt. It was dense, short, moist but not gummy, slightly sweet, very filling, and tasted sort of... I'm going to say spiritually nostalgic. I'd never eaten it before, but I felt like I had. It was good.

It made a huge amount of bread. I made so much that I had to bring most of it to work, and my coworkers demolished all 20 something loaves that were left and asked for more. So I guess they liked it. 

If I did it again, I would make the dough balls much smaller for practicality's sake. They would bake faster and be easier to give away in reasonable quantities than the plate-sized loaves that resulted. It would be more work to shape them, but that's fine by me, kneading leads to hand strength! 

I would probably also increase the amount of honey by half to make them sweeter - but that's just my preference. 

I will try it the next time we brew.