Slideshow: Making Pizza from Spent Beer Grains

I made a pizza dough that used some spent grains from our home-brewed imperial stout beer.

It was probably the ugliest pizza crust ever made, but the taste and texture turned out surprisingly well.

This might have been the best pizza that I've created.

The addition of the spent grains imparted a mild, earthy flavor, and the spent grains created a thicker and chewier crust.

The grains colored the crust a dark grey, which was somewhat expected, based upon the stout beer, made from the grains.

On brew day, I placed some of the spent grains in two, thick, air-tight, plastic containers, and I placed the containers in the freezer.

A few weeks later, I pulled one of the containers from the freezer and dried the grains, which took about three days.

On pizza-making day, I pulverized some dried spent grains in under 30 seconds, using our Vitamix.

The recipe:

• 110 g of spent grains, pulverized into mostly powder.
• 550 g of all-purpose flower
• 455 g of water (frig temp)
• 13 g of fine-grain sea salt
• 4 g dry active instant yeast

After mixing all the dry ingredients, the mixture had the color of buckwheat flour. It was colored a medium grey.

After all the ingredients were mixed by whisk and hand to form a sticky ball, I placed the dough on the counter and covered it with a bowl.

The covered dough rested for 25 minutes. This is called autolyse. Afterward, the dough felt great.

I kneaded the dough for a little over 4 minutes. The dough became stickier near the end of kneading.

I placed the kneaded dough into a lightly oiled (olive oil) bowl, which I covered with plastic.

The dough fermented for 3 hours. It rose higher than I expected, considering that the spent grains had little to no gluten.

After fermentation, I used a plastic dough scraper to remove the puffy dough mass from the bowl and onto a lightly oiled counter.

Then I divided the dough into approximately four equal parts.

For each of the small four pieces of dough, I conducted a stretch-and-fold, and then I shaped the dough into a tight ball.

I placed the dough balls onto a flour-covered board. (I used King Arthur white whole wheat flour on the board and on the wooden peel at baking time.)

Note: I didn't use the white whole wheat flour in this pizza recipe because I wanted to taste as much of the spent grains as possible, therefore ...

... I used only King Arthur all-purpose flour as the main pizza dough flour ingredient.

Spelt, rye, red whole wheat, and white whole wheat flours could mask the mild flavors from the spent grains. End note.

Back to the process. The tops of the dough balls were lightly covered with flour and then covered with plastic and left to proof for at least two hours.

The dough proofed well. This spent-grains-enhanced dough had good shape. Bizarre color though. Fun.

Even though the proofed dough was airy, it was stiff and difficult to shape into a round because of less gluten. The shaping required patience.

I went slow because I did not want to tear the dough, but I did tear it a couple times during shaping.

When a hole developed, I pinched the dough together to seal the hole, and then I let the dough rest for a few moments before resuming the shaping.

Normally for a proofed dough ball of this size, I can stretch the dough to the size of the wooden pizza peel. Not this time.

I topped the dough with Scarpetti marinara sauce, Turkey Foot Creek plain chevre goat cheese, olive oil, and coarse red Hawaiian sea salt.

Note:We were out of my wife's canned pasta/pizza sauce, that she makes in the fall. Also when I available, I use my wife's homemade ricotta cheese.

Prior to baking, I preheated the oven at 500 degrees for 40 minutes with the pizza stone placed in the middle of the oven.

When all was ready, I slid the dough onto the stone.

After 10 minutes of baking, I removed the pizza from the open, placed it on a cooling rack, and topped it with fresh basil from our backyard.

I let the pizza cool for a bit before cutting. I baked two pizzas. I ate the leftovers the next day.

Unfortunately, I didn't have any of our stout beer chilling at the time to compliment the pizza.

For dinner, I drank a different Trappist beer. I used greens from our garden to make the salad, which was topped with Nasturtium flowers, also from our backyard.

Our stout beer recipe contained the following ingredients: Black Patent Malt, Chocolate Malt, Coffee-Franco Belges, and Pale Malt (2 Row).

When we moved the beer from a primary fermenter to a secondary fermenter, we added a small amount of fresh, French press-pot brewed coffee. It was a delicious beer.

The End.