Spent Grain Sesame Bread

Step 2 Making the preferment

Making a preferment enhances the flavour, the texture, the keeping quality of a bread and it helps to soak the dried spent grains.(Or other coarsly ground grains and dry ingredients)
This preferment is a so called "poolish", it's a yeast only preferment. Most preferments use a mixture of yeast and lactic and acetic bacteria, but these are called sourdoughs.
If you want to go deeper into the details, i can recommend 2 books in english. One is "Bread" by Jeffrey Hamelman, the other is "Crust and Crumb" by Peter Reinhart.
I intend to do a instructable on the topic later on, but anyone really interested should consider one of these books.

Since i'm somewhat lazy, i use a bread maker to mix, knead and ferment most small batch doughs. (Mine works up to around 500g / 1lb flour)
But of course you can mix the ingredients with a spoon and knead the dough by hand. That's how i started as well. Later i used a hand mixer with kneading hooks. After breaking a couple of those hooks, i got a Kenwood kitchen machine. It kneads up to 1500g / 3lb flour doughs and is very sturdy.


Add the spent grains the sesame seeds and half the flour 250g / 8.8 oz into a bowl. Sprinkle the yeast over it and add the lukewarm water to it.
Stir it with a spoon or a hand mixer on low speed until evenly distributed. I start the bread machine on the Pizza setting, on this setting it starts to stir instantly. I let it stir for 5 minutes or so. The consistency of the preferment is batter-like.
If you want to use your bread maker, you have to look up the right program.

Now you have to let it ferment for 6 to 18 hours, depending on temperature it will start to bubble in around 2 hours. While fermenting, you have to cover your bowl with plastic wrap, otherwise a skin would form where the surface dries out.