How to make scrap bread more nutritious for chickens

[Altairsky]

I never fed my chickens bread because it's unhealthy and my chickens don't even like it. I also have many recipes to recycle old bread so I never had the problem of scrap bread until today.
I have some old brown bread (the one with seeds inside it), and I can't recycle it because brown bread is not good for my usual dinner recipes.
What do you think would make a decent recipe to turn old bread into a more nutritious meal?
I was thinking about soaking it in milk or yoghurt.
Would the water of the fermented food bowl be a decent option for soaking bread?
I can also open a can of fish or beans and soak the bread in but those things are a bit salty.
Any other idea?

 

[Red-Stars-in-RI]

I would suspect that the brown bread is already more nutritious than the standard commercial white bread most people talk about when they say "bread is bad for chickens" (I'd argue its likely no worse for chickens than it is for you, but I digress).

Soaking in milk, broth, or some other liquid with some nutritional value can only up the game. Yogurt, as you mention, is an option.

I'd only add those things if you had some that was going to be thrown away already...buying fresh food to mix with scraps to feed to the chickens feels like overkill to me.

 

[Perris]

a decent recipe to turn old bread into a more nutritious meal?
I was thinking about soaking it in milk or yoghurt.

I do this occasionally, and my flock devour it with vigour, using full milk or plain natural yogurt here.

Would the water of the fermented food bowl be a decent option for soaking bread?

I do this with first chick meals (offered at 2 days old, and soaked long enough for any hardness in stale bread to have softened completely), to inoculate the chicks' guts with good bacteria to get their microbiomes started well. Adults here get offered it occasionally too, and consume it quickly.

And more generally, how good or bad bread is for your chickens depends entirely on the bread. A home made sourdough using regenerative farmed flour, or a home made brioche, for example, are nutritious foods. Bread has been a staple of almost all cultures for thousands of years, because with fat added (as oil poured over in the Mediterranean region, or butter spread over in northern Europe) it makes a basic complete meal of carbs, protein and fats plus some salt.

 

[U_Stormcrow]

In moderation, its fine as is. And that whether you are talking "brown bread" the dense, molasses infused recipe often made in a can or "brown bread" an unbleached wheat (and/or pumpernickel or rye) studded with various seeds.

Breads are usually source of acceptable to decent B vitamins (much less so if you used bleached wheat flour) levels, can have some trace mineral ("enriched" - check your flour label!), and from a protein standpoint AA profile, are very low in Met, somewhat low in Thre and Lys (more so if you used bleached "all purpose" flour), ok source of Tryp. "Seeded" breads will help with ther Lys and Tryp, primarily. Serving w/ legumes is complimentary.

Yoghurt is generally a net positive (in moderation/infrequently) no matter what it is added to.

Oh, and your flour brand matters. "Lily" brand flours have consistently low protein levels - its why they are famed for their light fluffy cakes. "King Arthur" brand has consistently high relative protein levels. Their "All Purpose" flour's average protein is as the level most brands call "bread" flour, and their bread flour higher still.

Mostly, however, its simple carbs ("energy") with few anti-nutritive properties.

 

[Altairsky]

In moderation, its fine as is. And that whether you are talking "brown bread" the dense, molasses infused recipe often made in a can or "brown bread" an unbleached wheat (and/or pumpernickel or rye) studded with various seeds.

My chickens don't like bread, they throw it everywhere until they get tired of the game so it ends up as rat food. The purpose is to not only make it more nutritious but also more palatable to my spoiled birds.

Unfortunately the bread sold in my town is literal garbage. Even the brown one that is supposed to be healthier tastes so bland that it's probably dyed white flour.
I've tried every bakery in town and their bread is below grocery store quality.

I bake my own bread with locally milled flour and my fermented sourdough as often as I can, but sometimes I don't have enough free time for the whole process (and lately it rains every day. I need the sun to use the oven for free XD).

 

[U_Stormcrow]

I'd offer a hug if I could. I CAN NOT bake. It is a mystery beyond my ken. Make the same mistakes every time. Fortunately, my wife bakes several times a week, we have a sourdough she's been carting around for more than a decade.

If your birds won't touch the local bread, I wouldn't touch it either.

Hope your weather turns so you can get back to baking!

 

[Al Gerhart]

Ditto on the suggestion to soak it in milk before feeding. Back in the day, when they allowed fighting chickens in Oklahoma, that was a go to feed for roosters in keep. That is a process of cooping them up, in the dark, bringing them out twice a day to exercise, and feeding them a high protein, high oil diet to prepare them for a fight. When done right the rooster is just a bundle of energy, very strange.

But the roosters loved that bread and milk.

That said, in moderation, as a treat, stick to a commercial feed if you want to keep your birds healthy. Only different scenario is if your birds free range and have a wide variety of food available so they can get what they need.