To make our own beer, we have to follow a process called malting. During this process grains are malted. Malting refers to a process where the grains are soaked and gently cooked.
The malted barley is then mashed to extract nutrients, sugars, and proteins.
Any leftover grains are called spent grains. If you’re used to making your own beer, you’ll more than likely know exactly what spent grain is. What you might not know is how to use spent grain.
If you don’t, you’ve landed in the right place. In this post, we’ve put together a list of recipes you can follow to use up your spent grains.
We’ve got a wide range of tasty breakfast, lunch, dinner, and dessert recipes, so you can be sure you’ll find something you like.
We’ve got all the best recipes you need to utilize your leftover spent grains so let’s get started straight away, shall we?
1. Spent Grain Sandwich Bread
We’ll start things off with a delicious sandwich bread that you can make with spent grains and a handful of other basic pantry ingredients.
Most bread recipes made using spent grains are chewy and hearty. Whilst these taste great, we don’t want that all the time.
For those times we want soft, fluffy, and slightly crispy bread, this spent grain sandwich bread recipe from Pastry Chef Online is perfect.
You only need 8 different ingredients to make this bread. Those ingredients are water, bread flour, yeast, spent grains, olive oil, honey, salt, and egg.
It will take you a total of 6 hours to make this bread.
2. Spent Grain Cookies
You can use your leftover spent grains to make a batch of sweet, yet healthy cookies. These are the perfect snack you can make if you’re following a diet but you still want a sweet treat.
The best thing about these cookies is their lack of sugar. The spent grains are actually quite healthy because all of the sugar has been extracted.
To top things off, spent grains contain more protein than sugar. They are also quite low in carbohydrates.
Following this recipe, you can make a batch of chocolatey, crunchy, soft, and chewy cookies in just 20 minutes.
You only need 12 ingredients too, some of which are optional.
3. Spent Grain Applesauce Muffins
If you want to make a sweet treat that’s a little bit heartier, give this spent grain applesauce muffin recipe a try.
Crammed with spent grain and sweet applesauce goodness, these muffins are sweet, soft, fluffy, moist, and extremely addictive.
Perfect with a coffee in the morning or your homebrew in the evening, these muffins are equally as versatile as they are delicious.
Again, the lack of sugar in the spent grains ensures this recipe isn’t too sugary. This is important because the applesauce used adds strong sweetness to the muffins.
This recipe only calls for 10 basic ingredients.
4. Cheese And Bacon Spent Grain Scones
This cheese and bacon spent grain scones recipe from Betty Crocker is an excellent recipe to follow if you’re hosting a brunch or party.
Each serving only contains 270 calories and 16 grams of fat. This is pretty good compared to other scone recipes. This particular recipe helps you make a savory bacon and cheese score using just 11 ingredients.
The cheesiness of the cheese combined with the saltiness of the bacon makes a flavorful scone. In terms of textures, these scones are crispy and crumbly on the outside and soft and fluffy in the middle.
5. Spent Grain Flour
One of the easiest and best things you can do with your spent grain is turn it into spent grain flour. That spent grain flour can be used to make almost anything.
Turning spent grains into flour isn’t too difficult but you do need the right equipment. The main pieces of equipment you need are baking sheets, a wooden spoon, and a flour mill.
After that, the only thing you need is the spent grain.
Once the flour is made, you can use the spent grain to make cakes, bread, pizza, cookies, and so much more. This recipe shows you how to make spent grain flour perfectly.
6. Spent Grain Banana Bread
Banana bread might just be the easiest thing you can make using spent grain.
Made with two ripe bananas, a generous amount of spent grain flour, baking powder, salt, butter, sugar, and eggs, this cake is super simple to throw together and very quick to bake.
The end product is a sweet loaf of banana bread that has a moist banana filling and a crispy exterior.
To give the bread a more interesting flavor and texture, chopped pecans or walnuts can be added too. This gives the bread a more nutty flavor and a crunchier filling.
This sweet treat goes great with a fresh cup of coffee.
7. Spent Grain Pretzels
The combination of fresh pretzels and beer is famous for being delicious. With that in mind, you could serve your homebrew with some fresh pretzels you’ve made using the leftover spent grains.
This recipe does require a greater skill level as you have to make the dough and shape it, but the results are well worth the hard work.
The ingredients you need to make these pretzels are water, brown sugar, yeast, butter, salt, baking soda, vegetable oil, eggs, and of course, the spent grains.
You can shape and season the pretzels however you like, but we find the classic American shape and salty flavor hard to beat.
8. Spent Grain Pie Crust
Another ridiculously easy recipe that lets you make the most of your leftover spent grain is this spent grain pie crust recipe from Pary Moppins.
All you need to make this simple, yet tasty pie crust is spent grains, butter, cinnamon, and sugar. The pie crust can be made by processing your spent grains before mixing them with the other ingredients.
The end result is a light, crunchy, flavorful pie crust that goes well with a wide range of different pie fillings. We personally like to use this crust to make savory meat or potato pie.
It doesn’t go as well with stronger flavors like lemon.
9. Spent Grain Pizza Dough
As far as versatility goes, this spent-grain pizza dough recipe is the very best. Making pizza dough from your leftover spent grains leaves you with a dough that can be used to make any pizza you like.
You could even use the dough to make a wide range of flatbreads or naan bread.
To make this pizza dough, you need water, yeast, spent grains, olive oil, salt, and bread flour. The dough is then made by mixing everything together.
Once your dough is made, roll it out and stretch it into the shape of the pizza you like. You can then top the pizza dough with tomato sauce and any toppings you like. We like to go with cheese, pepperoni, and mushrooms.
10. Spent Grain Granola
We now move on to our final spent grain recipe. One of the best breakfasts you can make using leftover spent grains is granola. Granola is a healthy breakfast food that’s easy to make and very filling.
One of the best things about it is that you can throw in any ingredients you like.
Having said that, this recipe calls for spent grain, almonds, oats, sunflower seeds, cherries, maple syrup, cinnamon, sunflower oil, ginger, salt, and cardamom.
We found that this combination of ingredients creates a very fragrant, almost festive-flavored granola that would taste great in the winter.
Easy to make in batches, you might also wish to throw some dried dates or apricots into the granola.
Once your granola is made, store it in a jar or container and use it for the next couple of weeks for breakfast. You should serve your granola with yogurt or milk.
Final Thoughts
There you have it, 10 delicious spent grain recipes you need to try. As you can see from this list, there are plenty of excellent recipes that call for spent grain. Spent grains should never be thrown away.
They may seem like a waste but they are actually versatile ingredients that can be used to make a wide range of things.
It doesn’t matter if you’re looking for a hearty breakfast recipe, a quick and easy dough, a tasty snack, or a party-pleasing dessert, we included something for everybody on our list.
Now you’ve made your way through our list, you should take some time to narrow the options down. By doing this, you’ll be able to find the best recipe to make with your leftover spent grains.
You might find you have enough leftover grains to make more than one of these recipes
