It’s been a while since I made a sourdough loaf using my spent grain flour. I remembered how well the flavors played together and wanted to give it a shot with my new sourdough culture instead of the old whole wheat starter I had used with the last loaf.

Schedule: I based this loaf off of my sourdough schedule.

Since this is a 100% naturally leavened bread, I created a levain with my sourdough starter that was last fed 12 hours prior. This levain provides enough for 2 loaves of bread.

30 minutes before mixing the salt into the dough, I performed an autolyse by mixing the water, levain and flour together.

Ingredients:

Levain

Started at 8:10am with the following ingredients. Mix everything together and loosely cover and let it ferment for about 8 hours.

• 22g unfed sourdough starter (last feeding was 12 hours prior)
• 108g filtered water @ 85-90’F
• 108g bread flour

Dough

• 400g bread flour
• 45g spent grain flour
• 340g filtered water @ 90-95’F
• 108g levain
• 11g sea salt

Method:

After mixing the dough, I performed 3 stretch and folds within the first 3 hours. The dough fermented at room temperature (around 68’F) overnight. After the overnight fermentation I shaped the loaf before proofing in a banneton for about 2 hours.

I baked the loaves in a preheated dutch oven at 450’F for 38 minutes covered, then removed the lid of the dutch oven and baked for an additional 16 minutes.

Result:

As I’ve said before, this sourdough culture works extremely well. The spent grain flour usually causes the dough to be a little on the tough side and usually cases some venting issues in the oven. I was hoping the longer bulk fermentation and proofing would have helped prevent this but that’s not really the case. The dough fermented and proofed well and had a good oven spring, but the venting is a little fat. Next time I’ll use a lame and score it to see if I can get some better venting.

The intense flavor from the spent grain covers a lot of the nice sour flavor of the sourdough culture but the flavors do work well together.

My Baking Notes

• Ambient Temperature @ levain start: 69’F
• Levain start: 8:10am
• Ambient Temperature @ autolyse: 70’F
• Started autolyse @ 6:00pm
• Water temp: 92’F
• Dough was 83’F at autolyse
• Mixed @ 6:30pm
• Dough was 77’F after mixing
• 3 stretch and folds in first 3 hours
• Started proof @ 6:30am
• Preheated oven @ 7:30am
• Into oven @ 8:45am