Don’t brew oat sprouts – eat them!

This 2020 study chemically analyzed four grains and their brew-processing products:

“Side-stream products of malting, particularly rootlet, are currently treated as animal feed. Instead of ending up in final products (e.g., malt and beer), a substantial portion of phytochemicals end up in side streams.

Rootlets are being increasingly investigated to overcome their bitter taste and to unleash their potential. Adding the fact that side-stream products produced in high quantity are also rich in protein, their nutritional value may be too high to justify usage as feed rather than food.

Grains were steeped for 26 to 30 h with a wet–dry–wet steeping program. Oats were wet steeped for 4 h at 13 °C before and after 18 h of dry steeping at 15 °C.

All grains were germinated for 6 days at 15 °C, after which they were dried with a gentle kilning program to a final temperature of 83 °C and moisture of 4%. Rootlets were separated from malt after drying.

Statistically significant changes occurred in abundance of all 285 annotated phytochemicals during malting, when comparing whole grain with malted grain or rootlet. In oats, cumulative levels of avenanthramides increased by 2.6-fold in the malted grain compared to intact whole grain. Up to 25-fold increase has been reported previously after a slightly longer germination.

Phenolamides cumulative levels in oats increased in both malted grain (11-fold) and rootlet (50-fold). Cumulative flavonoid levels were nearly 3-fold higher in malted grain and rootlet compared to whole grain.

Avenanthramides and phenolamides had much lower extractability into the water extract and wort.

To our knowledge, this is the first time avenanthramides are reported from any other species than oats, suggesting that the synthesis pathway for avenanthramides evolved before oats diverged from the other cereals. Furthermore, benzoxazinoids are herein reported for the first time in oats.

Several previously uncharacterized saponins were found in oats in addition to the previously known avenacins and avenacosides. However, because of limited reference data currently available, their identity could not be determined beyond compound class and molecular formula in this study.

Plants can synthetize up to hundreds of thousands of secondary metabolites, and current spectral databases only contain a fraction of them to allow identification. Compounds found in this study do not represent the complete range of phytochemicals existing in cereals.”

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41538-020-00081-0 “Side-stream products of malting: a neglected source of phytochemicals”

Twice a day for six weeks I’ve eaten oat sprouts 3-to-6-days old from two species and three varieties. I’ve never noticed any “bitter taste” of rootlets mentioned.

Maybe “a final temperature of 83 °C and moisture of 4%” had something to do with it? Oat sprouts I ate never got above 25°C, and I doubt their moisture content was < 80%.

Maybe “Oats were wet steeped for 4 h at 13 °C before and after 18 h of dry steeping at 15 °C” gave oat sprouts a bitter taste? I process oat sprout batches the same way I do broccoli sprout batches. A new batch soaks to start germination every 12 hours, then is rinsed three times every 24 hours on a 6 hours – 6 hours – 12 hours cycle. Temperature in my kitchen is 21°C (70°F) because it’s winter outside.

The above graphic is a heat map of 29 studied C-type avenanthramides. Don’t know why 26 known A-type avenanthramides described in Eat oats today! weren’t analyzed. The second study of Sprouting oats stated: