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Mead Bread?

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pax

NewBee
Registered Member
Feb 25, 2007
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Hello everyone,

Total newbie here. A buddy of mine has been using our kitchen to make mead for the past couple of years, with my clumsy and ill-informed assistance. Fascinating (and yummy) stuff.

My question is probably a long shot in this crowd, but I couldn't think who else to ask. Bear with me, please!

I do a lot of sourdough breadbaking, and have been particularly intrigued by the parallel lives of bread- and brew-yeasts. So as a kind of historical exploration (and maybe just because it sounds do-able), I'd like to use some of the mead dregs to flavor and rise a loaf of bread.

Now obviously, it would be no big deal to simply use mead to create a new sourdough starter, but I was hoping for a "mead-ier" final loaf, one that would be a true Mead Bread and not simply a sourdough bread that once had mead in its ancestry.

Has anyone here experimented with using an actively fermenting mead in breadmaking? Got a recipe or just some tips to share?

Thanks,

pax
 
Aloha and welcome, pax!

I've yet to try this with mead dregs, but we did try it with beer dregs from the earliest days of my homebrewing experiences. Our experiment could be best described by the term "kinda funky."

Not to worry! We blamed that more on the choice of bread recipe than on the yeast, which performed admirably in its role. We were just surprised how much yeast character and how little bread character that slurry imparted to the funky finished product.

If ever there was a place to find the perfect mead-dregs recipe, it is here. And, whether you find it or bravely try to develop it on your own, please keep us posted!
 
Chimerix ~

Thanks for the welcome & the friendly reply.

Beginning to look as if I'm going to have to just start experimenting. Bummer -- I was hoping to find at least a jumping off place!

pax
 
Ok, after an evening of collectively trying to remember exactly what we did, I now have one concrete piece of advice to offer:

Don't use yeast in a bread recipe designed for baking soda!

It was, as I believe I mentioned earlier, funky.

Good luck!
 
bread from mead dregs

I've done this several times. The yeast I used fermented the mead to dry and still had a much higher alcohol tolerance. If your yeast has reached its alcohol tolerance this probably wouldn't work. My mead has about 12% alcohol, but the yeast could go to 18%. I added extra sugar to the dregs and enough flour ( I used whole wheat and bread flour) to make a very wet dough. I let it rise for about 3 hours at room temperature. Then, I give it a quick knead and shape into a loaf. I find it to be a quite slow riser, so I leave it to rise overnight and bake it the next morning. It makes an extremely flavorful and chewy bread.
 
DAMMIT, now I have another thing on the list to try converting to gluten-free!!! Thinking about dregs with fruit bits too...
 
Recipe (or more aptly named: experiment):

Dry Mead
OG: 1080
FG: 0998
Yeast: D47
ABV: 12% (tolerance 14%)

counted out 4 cups of flour (standard loaf size for my breadmaker, and oven loaf tin)
Shook lees into suspension
Added lees until dough 'seemed right'
a pinch of salt

Turned breadmaker on to prepare dough

Pulled it out before it had time to properly rise as per the machine's wishes (it was 1:00am and I hadn't realised)

warmed the oven to about 35C
placed dough in loaf tin and left to rise.

8:00am: warmed the oven up again
8:30am: fired up the oven to 180 and baked

Promptly forgot about it, and at 10:20 rescued the loaf.

Didn't rise as much as normal bread.
Had a thick crust. (cos I over cooked it)

Tasted pretty damnably good!
I would make a wetter dough, and add sugar next time, to maybe give the yeast a little more life.
 
FWIW, I did a similar experiment aeons ago (circa 1980 or so), and I found that when I used mead lees as a leavening agent for bread that it worked far better if you treated the dough like a typical sourdough recipe (as in, make a "sponge," allow that to work for a day or longer in order to build up a large colony of active yeast, etc....) It works quite well, if you also have the patience to wait hours for the risings. But hey, meadmakers have learned patience as part of the hobby, eh? ;)
 
Sure!

A sponge is a very wet mixture of flour and water (at least 1 to 1 water and flour by volume - sometimes depending on your climate and/or altitude you'll need even more water in it - and it can also have little extra fermentable sugar added). That serves as a starter growth medium for your yeast. Sourdough yeasts can be harvested directly out of the air by exposing this wet mixture to the air for a bit, then loosely covering the container with a cloth and allowing those yeast cells to be fruitful and multiply, stirring every few hours until you begin to see signs of fermentation. Or, if you already have a mature sourdough starter, you can simply add a few spoonsful of it to a bowl that has the flour/water sponge mixture in it, mix thoroughly, cover loosely, and wait for things to happen. You can also do the same with the surface layer of lees from a fermented beer or mead - just mix those lees in with the water and flour, and keep that starter sponge mixture loosely covered in a nice warm place, and pretty soon the mix will have enough CO2 percolating up through it that it begins to resemble a wet sponge.

The sponge serves as the base for your dough - the rest of the process entails adding enough flour to create a bread dough like consistency when kneaded. A little salt, and optionally a little cooking oil, is also usually added during the initial mixing/kneading.

Sourdough doughs (and mead or beer yeast doughs) are notorious for taking LOTS of time to rise, so expect your breadmaking to take up the better part of a full day while you wait on those rise intervals.

Update: Here's one of the better sourdough websites that I've run across: http://www.io.com/~sjohn/sour.htm
 
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phreebyrd said:
do you need baking soda and have how much salt do you need
Click to expand...

No, the yeast cake does the rising. Baking soda could be used if you are dissatisfied with the yeast's rising ability though. I wouldn't but then I'm a purist ;)

I added 1 tsp of salt per 4 cups of flour... I usually add 1-2 tsp to 3 - 6 cups...
most of my cooking is by feel, or 'Bucket chemistry' as it's called in the geeky circles I move in, so exact amounts are almost unheard of.
 
wayneb said:
Sourdough doughs (and mead or beer yeast doughs) are notorious for taking LOTS of time to rise, so expect your breadmaking to take up the better part of a full day while you wait on those rise intervals.

Update: Here's one of the better sourdough websites that I've run across: http://www.io.com/~sjohn/sour.htm
Click to expand...

Thanks for the link, Wayne! I had to try this, and currently the house smells like sourdough heaven.

On a similar note, I used some lees from a 5 gallon batch as the starter, and it took off like a rocket. The dough even rose really quickly (although I'm sure it could do a bit more if left to go longer than the few hours I did for). I'm definitely doing this more often. ;D

phreebyrd said:
do you need baking soda and have how much salt do you need
Click to expand...

Check out the link Wayne provided. It's got a good recipe. No baking soda, and only a few teaspoons of salt. Pretty simple...and cheap! :)
 
phreebyrd said:
this is gonna b cool thanks, i have a batch im about to move to a new jug. do i just save the lees and use them imediatly or how do i you do it
Click to expand...

That's what I did! :) I just added an equal amount of flour as lees slurry until I got the consistency described in that article for the "sponge" or starter. The bread is cooling now...I wanna eat it sooooo badly! ;D
 
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