A diet of seeds will give you scurvy. A diet of sprouted seeds will give you better nutrition than you have now. Yachties, survivalists, and Mormons count on sprouts as a way to thrive on cheap stored food.
There's not much to it. Soak the seeds or beans for a day, then rinse and drain them once a day.
After the first day they've magically become fresh vegetables.
Mung beans and lentils are the easiest to find and sprout.
Eat them quick! They'll keep growing and you'll have too much.
Here's a jarfull of mung I sprouted in the cab of my truck while driving south, camping and building my going-to-Cuba canoe on the way. Some sprouts are better grown in the dark. When exposed to light they start making green leaves. These are fine.
That's all you really need to know.
That and the fact that a lot of your food is contaminated with poison.
So you better find a source of safe water and switch to a diet of sprouts.
There's not much to it. Soak the seeds or beans for a day, then rinse and drain them once a day.
After the first day they've magically become fresh vegetables.
Mung beans and lentils are the easiest to find and sprout.
Eat them quick! They'll keep growing and you'll have too much.
Here's a jarfull of mung I sprouted in the cab of my truck while driving south, camping and building my going-to-Cuba canoe on the way. Some sprouts are better grown in the dark. When exposed to light they start making green leaves. These are fine.
That's all you really need to know.
That and the fact that a lot of your food is contaminated with poison.
So you better find a source of safe water and switch to a diet of sprouts.
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Signing UpStep 1: Your Basic Mung Beans
Here are some dry mung beans I got at an Indian grocery store for $1 a pound or so. The broken ones won't sprout, but the others will. Mung and plain old regular lentils germinate with more vigor than adzuki, chickpeas, soybeans, or any other of the seeds I've tried. That makes it easy because dead seeds want to spoil. When there are no dead seeds your sprouts will stay good longer and require less rinsing.
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I also see that he has no health problem so can we assume, once you rinse them it is ok to sprout them? I would like an answer by anyone please..
thanks
I just used a random plastic food container I had and some plastic mosquito netting we bought the other day for our windows, secured with a rubber band. I sprouted lentils (after letting them soak overnight and rinsing them each day) and this is how they look on the third day!
Now I found an asian-type recipe I'll try (from Allrecipes). Thanks for the instructable!
You can sprout almost any bean or seed you can buy dry in the grocery store. Dried chick peas, green peas and lentils make a tasty combination for salads, and soup. You can do the same with wheat and rye grains. You can buy packages of seeds at your health food store that have other seeds, beans and grains. These have soaking instructions on them which is usually 6 to 10 hours. Try sunflower or clover. In 3 to 5 days you have some yummy, supernutritious sprouts.
This instructable was great, because I didn't think of using a yoghurt container. I bought one of those sprouter containers that set me back $20. One thing though, I rinse my sprouts twice a day . I use a mason jar with a screen lid now where I can watch the progress of the sprouts and then put it in the light to green up the leafy ones.
There are some sees like amaranth and teff which are very tiny and should not be soaked. Use a mist sprayer. Other seeds like broccoli and flax should not be soaked, but laid out on paper towel as they form a gelatinous mass from their seed coats. Use a mist sprayer to water.
Do not eat tomato or potato sprouts as they are poisonous. Do not use lawn seed as this has been specially treated for lawn use.
I see Wikipedia says "All the sprouts of the solanaceae (tomato, potato, paprika, aubergine or eggplant) and rhubarb cannot be eaten as sprouts, either cooked or raw, as they can be poisonous."
Anyway, go read the Wikipedia page if you want, it's got a lot of interesting info :)
Here are the links to the USDA's nutrient database for Lentil Sprouts and Mung Bean Sprouts as well as their data on the Nutrition Data website (lentil sprouts, mung bean sprouts) which gives you nice graphs about how filling and nutritious they are. (I think the Nutrition Data site is the better of the two)
All in all it looks like lentils are definitely the more calorific of the two (106 vs 30 kcal). Mung bean sprouts have a higher "completeness" (spectrum of minerals) and "amino acid score" (spectrum of amino acids) than lentil sprouts (notably lentil sprouts have no tryptophan, which is an essential amino acid for humans). Lentil sprouts have a bit higher vitamin C and more thiamin and folate than mung bean sprouts, but mung bean sprouts have much more vitamin K.
I would think either of them are great, mung beans might be a bit better though, and you shouldn't live on a diet of only lentils as you'll have a lack of tryptophan in your diet (but who lives on only one food source?) Anyways, have a look at those pages and you can draw your own conclusions too :)
As for your second question, when your sprouts are ready you can keep them for a few days in the refrigerator (like the instructable says - this slows down or stops their metabolic activity) or you can eat them all and start a new batch. You can have several batches running at the same time (started a day after each other) to ensure you always have fresh sprouts.
For your third question: I would think storing unsprouted seeds in a vacuum container would not damage them at all - I don't think they need air to stay in quiescence (their dormant state) as their dormancy is supposed to protect the seed until it gets the environmental signals that lets it know that it's safe to start growing. For safety's sake I would try to use the seeds before their "Best before" date, but that said...
Once I threw out an old packet of lentils in the hopes that the birds would eat it. It rained the next day and as all the beans were lying in water I thought they'd go off, so I threw them into the garden to serve as mulch. Lo and behold, a few days later there were lentil sprouts *everywhere*. So if the packet is old the seeds might still sprout, I'd just advise removing those that don't sprout as the dead seeds can spoil the rest.
lentils and things don't seem to mind
Back in Dec, I bought a pouch of mung seeds from theHindi store. The sprouts take a week and they do not look like the bean sprouts that you buy in the store (or the picture). What is the brand of mung pictured? I'd like to grow some that look like the bean sprouts they use in chow mein???
What worked well: Our grocery and health food stores have a section of canisters for sprouting. Expensive by the lb but a little lasts a long time. Their alfalpha and mixes taste and work better.
My LDS pals, if they store at all, mostly just subscribe to a storage service and eat regular food.
I've gotten a lot of great food storage and sprouting info from LDS sources. For instance the church's own site. A search of LDS.org will find all one needs to know on the subject of sprouting.