Spent Grain Grissini

About a year ago, I started to get into homebrewing: I like craft beer and really enjoyed the process of brewing all-grain batches with the “Brew in a Bag” method. Trying to be mindful about resources, I didn’t want to dump the spent grains into the waste bin and quickly started to store it away in the freezer to bake spent grain bread.

There are tons of spent grain bread recipes on the internet which yield decent results, but I also wanted to add a bit of variety. A friend of mine sparked the idea when she told me that she had used some of my spent grains in a pizza dough and liked the result. After brewing my most recent batch, I used some of the spent grains for baking spent grain grissini, which are a great alternative to the trusted spent grain bread recipe.

Spent Grain Grissini (breadsticks) #

Note: I have updated the recipe on June 6, 2021: The first version was quite soft, so I tried another version with less dough hydration.

Ingredients (for about two baking trays of grissini) #

• 450g wheat flour (in my case: 300g wheat and 150g wholeweat flour)
• 170g spent grains
• 150ml water
• 10g olive oil
• 10g salt
• 5g fresh yeast
• optional: 7g flaked dried tomatoes
• optional: about 50g old sourdough starter (52g in my case)

Instructions #

1. Optional: Blend the spent grains for a 15-30sec.
2. Mix the ingredients in a bowl and knead the dough for about 2-5min.
3. Cover the bowl with a plate or a kitchen towl and let it rest for 1-2h.
4. Pre-heat the oven to 180°C.
5. Add some flour to your countertop/table. Divide the dough into pieces of about 30g. Use your fingers to roll it lightly into breadsticks that are about 1cm thick and about 30cm long. Make sure that their thickness is about even, as you will get different levels of softness/crunchiness otherwise.
6. Line two baking trays with baking paper and transfer the breadsticks on the trays.
7. Bake for about 12-15min.

Here is a quick photo of one of the two trays of grissini that I made: