Spent Baguette: The process

 There have been a few compliments of the spent grain baguettes, so I will show how it went here. I used a formula from Maggie Glezer's Artisan Baking that she got from The Acme Bread Company. I don't feel that sharing the formula here would be proper, but others haven't had such scruples, as you can see here. I've tweaked the recipe a bit, obviously with the spent grain, but also instead of making the old dough I just used some of my sour starter in combo with the poolish.

Yeast and water mixture. A number of formulas call for this step, but I've found it largely unnecessary.

Here I've roughly mixed the flour, salt, and yeasted water mixture. I let it autolyse for about 30 min.

This is my poolish after about 12 hours.

A look from above - nice and bubbly

Adding the poolish to the autolyse. I added about 4oz of sour starter at this point too.

Here is a frozen chunk of spent grain a few hours before I made the dough.

I soaked the grain for about an hour so that it wouldn't sop up all the hydration in the dough.

Grain after soaking.

Poolish, sour, and grain all mixed in. As you can probably see it's rather soupy.

After kneading for about 10 min. 

After proofing and turning thrice at 20 minute intervals, I divided the dough into 12oz pieces. 

They enjoyed each other's company. 

Shaped into baguettes and covered with plastic wrap so as to keep them from drying out. 

Final rest before baking. 

Trayed up. Unfortunately I broke my baking stone a while back. 

They can sense that the end is near. 

And the final product. Not as much color as I would have liked, but not terrible for a home-bake. 

These are excellent with a sharp cheese and, of course, beer. Since making these I've found two formulas I like better for the beer bread idea. When I finally get one I like, I'll stop fixating on the whole beer bread thing and move on to something else.