Thursday, April 4, 2013

Spent Grain flour



Usually I just compost my spent grains, but I'm always keeping my ears open for other ways of using them. Baking with spent grains is a pretty well-known option, but a lot of the recipes I've seen use the grains while they're still wet, which means you've got to get them into a baking project shortly after they're taken out of the mash (otherwise they'll start to stink pretty quick; spent grains still have residual sugar, and are a fertile environment for bacteria). Since I'm usually busy with the brew at that time, and not eager to get into another project just after finishing a brew session, I normally don't try the wet-grain baking option.

My girlfriend, on the other hand, is a baking enthusiast. She's been interested in finding ways of using the spent grains too, and recently she decided to try preparing the grains in a way that would lend them to longer-term storage. She decided to make them into flour.



First she dished a few pounds of the grains onto two cookie sheets, until the grains were about a quarter inch thick.

Then she put them in the oven at 170 degrees Fahrenheit, and left them in until they were bone dry and slightly toasted (which took a few hours).



Then she dished the dried grains into the food processor and ground them into dust.



She's planning on using the flour soon, blending it in 50/50 with whole wheat flour for dough. I'll let you know how that turns out.

No comments:

Post a Comment