Tuesday, October 14, 2014

Recipe: Spent grain banana bread

Hello there all,

I have a confession. I used to hate bananas. Yes, it is true. Even the smell of baking banana bread made me want to puke. However, in my older refined age, I have grown to love them and even yearn to smell banana bread baking.

Recently, the honey made one of his delicious batches of beer leaving us with a lot of spent grain. What is spent grain? They are the grains that are used in the beer making process. After the the home brewing adventure, you are left with gallons of grains. There are a couple of things that you can do with your leftover spent grain that we do (who wants to throw away food that you paid for?):

  • Add into our compost bin
  • Make spent grain flour (drying out the grains and then grinding them up, so they make a flour) to bake with
  • Using the wet grains in recipes (the drawback to this method is that the grains can only stay good in the refrigerator for so long before they go bad)


With a heaping load of wet grains ticking away in our refrigerator and multiple bananas melting away, it only made sense to make up a delicious batch of banana bread.

The recipe that I concocted was influenced by the recipe here.

What you'll need:
  • 1 cup of all purpose flour
  • 1/2 cup of tightly packed brown sugar
  • 2 tsp of baking soda
  • 1/2 tsp of salt
  • 4 mashed bananas
  • 1 egg
  • 3 tbsp of molasses
  • 1.5 tsp of cinnamon
  • 1 tsp of vanilla
  • 3/4 cup of wet spent grain (you could substitute this for other things like rolled oats)
  • 5 tbsp of melted butter
  • chocolate chips (optional)

What to do:
  1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
  2. In a bowl, mix together flour, brown sugar, cinnamon, baking soda, and salt.
  3. In a separate bowl, mix together: egg, mashed bananas, vanilla, melted butter, and spent grain.
  4. Gradually add the dry mixture of flour, sugar, etc. to the wet mixture of egg, bananas, etc.
  5. Pour mixture into a greased bread pan. Sprinkle with chocolate chips if you desire.
  6. Bake at 350 degrees for 1 hour.
  7. NOM!

The wet mixture

The mixture of dry and wet ingredients in the pan. Contemplating the life long question: to add chocolate or not to add chocolate?

Of course you add chocolate!

 The delicious noms fresh from the oven. This is a fairly moist/dense recipe, but I mean that in all of the best ways. It is delicious.

-Autumn




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