Cooking with spent grains, anyone done this?

Well, after starting my first (real) home brew, which is a Killians red ale clone, I decided to use the spent mixed grains in the crock pot with a corned beef. Put the corned beef in the pot and laid the muslin bag with the grains on top and filled with water to the top. Been cooking since last night and smells great.

Anyone else cooked any food with spent grains or even unspent grains?? If so, what did you make?

I saw the posting about the bread and cookies already.

Makes great dog treats!!! And yes I have tried a bite of one...LOL!

I made granola once. Not so good. If I was starving I'd eat it though.

Dog Treat thread here...
https://www.homebrewtalk.com/f39/spent-grain-make-your-best-friend-cookies-87097/

+1 dog treats

Little guy loves them...

Ok, anything other than dog treats? Looking for people food ideas.
Thanks

I've made these and they were awesome:

http://www.omnomicon.com/spent-grain-cookies

Google "spent grain recipes" and a ton of things will come up. Most popular appear to be bread, pizza dough, and dog treats.

I've just started using brewing leftovers in my bread baking. I finished a True Brew Porter and I decided to use the left over chocolate grain malt in the dough. In the attached pic, you can see the specks of chocolate malt grain. How does this make my sinnamon rolls better? Hmm, more rustic the wife says. I think this addition provides more texture, chewiness, and richer bread. See the recipe below.

Dough Formula
Whole wheat flour: 100%
Milk or buttermilk: 58%
Egg: 12.4%
Honey: 18.8%
Butter, melted: 6.2%
Salt: 2%
Instant yeast: 1.3%

Dough Ingredients
Whole wheat flour: 450 grams
Lukewarm buttermilk: 275 grams
Egg: 1 large, lightly beaten
Honey: 85 grams
Butter, melted: 28 grams
Salt: 9 grams
Instant yeast: 6 grams
CHOCOLATE GRAIN MALT: 2 Tablespoons

Filling ingredients
Brown sugar: 210 grams
Egg White: 1 large
Cinnamon: 14 grams
Salt: Just a pinch
Currants or raisins: 100 g
Chopped pecans: 60 grams 6 MONTH BOURBON SOAKED

Cinnamon Roll Glaze
Powdered sugar: 120 grams
Lemon juice or milk: 15-30 grams

Mixing
Mix the milk, egg, honey and butter. Mix the flour, salt and yeast in a separate bowl, and then add to the liquids.
Develop dough.
Dough will be ready in about 2 hours.

Filling and Glaze
mix everything together until smooth except the dried fruit.
mix up the glaze and cover.

Shaping
Grease a 9x13 inch pan.
Then, on a lighlty floured surface, roll out the dough into a rectangle that's roughly 12x16 inches. Spread the filling over the dough, leaving a margin of about an inch on the top and bottom edges. Scatter the dried fruit and the nuts over the filling.

Roll the dough into a log and then, using a serrated knife or some dental floss, divide the log in half. Cut the two halves in half. Finally, divide each of these sections into three so you end up with 12 buns. Place the buns in the pan.
Cover the pan with plastic and pop them in the refrigerator. The next morning, let them warm up with the oven light on until they begin to touch.

Baking
Bake at 350 degrees for about 30 minutes.
Leave the rolls in the pan and drizzle the glaze over them.
Cool for 20-30 minutes.

Original Recipe from the Fresh Loaf:
http://www.thefreshloaf.com/handbook/whole-wheat-cinnamon-rolls-amp-sticky-buns

It makes great treat for the chickens and goats

Not to be overly critical of everyone's helpful suggestions ... but here I go. It seems the recipes only use a little bit of spent grain; 4 cups at most. I was hoping there would be a way to use an entire batch's worth (without scaling up the recipe times a million, necessitating large quantities of the other ingredients, and not being able to give away a million batches of dog treats every time you brew).

I'm guessing there is no way to recycle an entire batch's worth of spent grain into edible human food. It's the hulls that are the problem, right? They have that straw-like quality that is not delicious in massive quantities. I'm wondering if the spent grain could be ground finely, maybe in a meat grinder type machine, so that the fibrous hulls are mashed into a non-straw-like powder, and the barley's endosperm & other tasty bits become a mush. Then you could spread the mush on several trays and bake at a low temp, then crumble, to make a sort of high-fiber cereal. Hmmmmm. I lack a barley-grinding mechanism for such an experiment. Anybody tried this, or something like it?

I've done dog treats and bread, looking at pizza crusts and those cinnamon rolls look amazing.

I've also just eaten some straight from the mash tun, but they tend to get stuck in your teeth.

Proboscidea said:

Not to be overly critical of everyone's helpful suggestions ... but here I go. It seems the recipes only use a little bit of spent grain; 4 cups at most. I was hoping there would be a way to use an entire batch's worth (without scaling up the recipe times a million, necessitating large quantities of the other ingredients, and not being able to give away a million batches of dog treats every time you brew).

I'm guessing there is no way to recycle an entire batch's worth of spent grain into edible human food. It's the hulls that are the problem, right? They have that straw-like quality that is not delicious in massive quantities. I'm wondering if the spent grain could be ground finely, maybe in a meat grinder type machine, so that the fibrous hulls are mashed into a non-straw-like powder, and the barley's endosperm & other tasty bits become a mush. Then you could spread the mush on several trays and bake at a low temp, then crumble, to make a sort of high-fiber cereal. Hmmmmm. I lack a barley-grinding mechanism for such an experiment. Anybody tried this, or something like it?

Click to expand...

The thing is, if you've made beer with them you've (hopefully) extracted almost all the sugar, so there isn't much nutrition left but fiber. They're pretty bland in fact (although I made a Belgian Dark Strong and ended up with 60% efficiency so the spent grains were still tasty!). That's why they use them as filler when feeding livestock. So I guess you could use all of it in one go, but it probably won't taste too great...

There's still some starch left over. You could probably dry it out and run it through a flour mill and at least cut plain white flour with your spent grain flour to get a different texture and flavor.

ReverseApacheMaster said:

There's still some starch left over. You could probably dry it out and run it through a flour mill and at least cut plain white flour with your spent grain flour to get a different texture and flavor.

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When I make bread there is usually a cup or two of grain in a large loaf, its enough to give some flavor, and a lot of awesome texture, but I usually throw about 8oz of homebrew in too. Beer bread with beer grains, can't beat it.

I typically take about half of my grist (6lbs of grain) and throw it in my dehydrator and run it on low for about 48 hours until the grain becomes really dry. Ive made cookies, bread, granola, and pancakes with the dried grain (its much easier to store and cook with when its dry). I am going to try running it through the mill again after its dried out to help separate the husks but Ive found a small mesh strainer works pretty well too! After separating it from the husks I believe it will be much easier to cook with and Ill try a few more things. The bread is turning out pretty well as well as the pancakes but the granola and cookies still have a ways to go. Let me know if you'd like any of the recipes!

Cheers

Andrew

The spent grain must be free of hops to be fed to dogs...Chickens,Pigs, goats love it...