BellaOnline Forums Money Frugal Living Stale Bread? Make Kvass

I have some stale rye bread and i've heard you can make a very mildly alcoholic drink from old bread. In Russia, they make Kvass - a mildly fermented bread 'beer' . I am working on making some right now.

The alcoholic content is supposed to end up at 1.2% and i'm looking forward to trying it! Apparently beverages like this were drank by everyone across time. As adults did not drink milk, and water was not sanitary, fermented beverages kept a hard working body going through the day. Men, women and children grew up on this. Maybe they were always mildly inebriated?

At this point the bread mixture is at stage one. I've got the stale toast mixed with boiling water, covered, and sitting in a warm place (right now the outside is a warm place). At around midnight I will add yeast and sugar, strain and let sit again for ten hours.

After that it gets bottled for three days with some raisins. I will report on each stage as it goes.

This is the kvass recipe i am using right now. But there seem to be thousands of ways to make bread beer.

This recipe on a master russian website seems good also. This one adds mint. I figured i'd try it the basic way first before going all crazy with herbs.

I just finished stage two of Kvass making. I even remembered to get a photo this time.

After four hours of sitting, I took the bloated bread/water mix and strained it through cloth. I put the mush aside.

In another bowl, lukewarm water and three packages of yeast. 1/2 cup sugar. Stirred. It started foaming.

Then i mixed the yeast with the bread liquid, stirred it a little, covered it and placed it in a warm spot. It will sit there ten hours before I can do step three, which is the bottling phase.

The bread mush i put in a covered bowl in a cool place to decide what to do with later. I might make some kind of porridge in the morning, or make a bread pudding. No need to toss that part, really. It's not fermented or anything.

This is a great use for stale bread! I can't wait to try the result. I always have a lot of extra bread around from the food pantries.

And here I thought stale bread was only good for croutons and bread crumbs......

This recipe is not something that would appeal to me, but you will have to let us know how it turns out, Jilly. Sounds very interesting!

Thanks, Debbie. Apparently, this is the stuff the pyramids were built on.

Today: stage three. I strained the bread/water/yeast/sugar mixture through thin cloth, and then poured it into bottles. I added some raisins to the bottles as suggested on various recipe sites.

Oh, i gave a little taste at this point. Very pleasant, very mild, has a bread like flavor with a hint of sourness from the yeast. Nice. can't wait to sample in three days after the bottle fermentation period. It made around 2.5 quarts from this recipe.

here is another web page full of kvass recipes. There are lots of ways to do this! Apparently it doesn't have to use rye bread, and it doesn't have to be toasted. You can just use stale bread.

Mint tea is a popular addition to many recipes. I will try that next with stale wheat bread.

Note recipes are in grams, and English is not someone's first language.

Tasting my first Kvass today. I need to get a hygrometer to test the alcohol level, but there are bubbles! Fermentation occured!

The taste: a little odd. It's like a thick, bready light beer. Which is what it is, but still. It's pleasant, sourish and cloudy (like a hefeweisen ale). It also tastes like a food. It might take developing a palette for this. I might have liked it better before it fermented.

Maybe people add mint/marjoram to it to make it less yeasty flavored? I think some fennel would be a nice addition. That would add a hint of licorice and a small bite. Maybe ginger would be good in it too.

Notes: the raisins rose to the top and the yeast sank to the bottom in a little white line. It could stand to be strained again but i am not going to bother.

Hmmm. I let the other bottles ferment a bit longer and it's definitely tasting better. When this is gone I'll make more and report on my tweaks. I highly recommend that people interested in home brewing start with something super easy like this.

I also realized I have a hydrometer and can test the alcohol level. I need to read up on exactly how to do that. I'm sure there is a You Tube video on it somewhere.

I do have photos of my Kvass processing. I guess the thing to do is write up an article about it and then link to it here.

That's neat, Jilly. At least it tastes good after all of that diligence! Keep us posted.