Sunday, January 9, 2011

A recipe that's fun to make but you're not going to want to eat it

Having pondered posting recipes to carrotpeople for a long time, it seems only fitting to finally start posting with this one. Something you aren't going to want to eat, but maybe someone else in your household will?
My keen eye noticed the home brew store was selling dog treats made from spent barley mash. If they could do it, surely I could and with only one google search, 3 seconds later I had the recipe. Without further ado, here's the first recipe:
Homebrew dog treats (adapted from a thread on realbeer.com)
    4 cups spent barley mash 
    3 cups flour
    1 egg 
    1 cup peanut butter (I used Jif)
Bake for about 30 minutes on 350 degrees. Then dry at 200 degrees for many hours (they said 8-10 and one lady used her food dehydrator instead). They said if you don't super dry them you'll get mold after a week. My plan is to give lots away and gorge my dog on them so as to not let them last a week and not test the mold theory.
But as you'll soon learn, I'm fairly lazy and try to simplify most recipes I make. And in this case I altered the recipe a bit by drying the mash for a day before starting.
I scored them a variety of ways, and declare the cookie cutter a failure. The top of the peanut butter jar worked ok but the jigger and pizza cutter seem to do the best job. From my manhandling the things so far, they seem to flake and break so it's possible my dog will be eating crumbs for the next week as they may not be shapely enough to give away, but time will tell as I check the oven next time. With more beer batches, I'll have more chances to test this and report back on progress. But based on the dog joining me in the kitchen and following me around while I gave her samples to taste, every batch is going to be a success in her eyes.

3 comments:

  1. Awesome! I love the picture of Sam looking up. How do I get my hands on a sample for McCoy?

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  2. Maybe I can bring some over when I stop by to take a cutting of plant from your yard?

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  3. The 3 cups flour batch came out better. And 2 hours of drying in a 200 degree oven has been enough to keep them fresh so far (20 days).

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