Growing Your Own Fresh Sprouts

Discussion in 'Food & Drinks' started by Yvonne Smith, Apr 14, 2015.

  1. Herb Durant

    Herb Durant Very Well-Known Member
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    They wont let us play with guns but we can smoke all the weed we want we also have safe injection sites for the heavier stuff .
    My Grey would destroy the lentil sprouts:)
     
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  2. Susan Paynter

    Susan Paynter Very Well-Known Member
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    MUNG BEAN SPROUTS RAITA
    Ingredients
    4 SERVINGS
    2 cups yogurt (vegans may use any plant-based yogurt of their choice)
    4 tablespoons mung bean sprouts
    2 green chillies (finely chopped, or as per taste) could get spicy, I would remove seeds n use less.
    1/2 teaspoon dry mint (powder you may also use finely chopped fresh mint leaves)
    Salt (Sendha, Himalayan pink salt as per taste You may also use normal white salt)
    1/4 teaspoon black pepper (powder)
    1/2 teaspoon flax seeds
    1/2 teaspoon roasted white sesame seeds

    Instructions

    Beat the yogurt nicely, add some water or buttermilk if the yogurt is too thick.

    Add in the sprouts, green chilies, salt, pepper, mint powder and mix well.

    Sprinkle some roasted sesame and flax seeds and enjoy your protein-rich raita!

    Use your imagination and eat it with a rice pulse, tandoori chicken, and Nan.
    (East Indian style)
     
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  3. John Brunner

    John Brunner Senior Staff
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    @Yvonne Smith

    I finally bough a few sprouting lids. I've got fenugreek seeds, brown mustard seeds and black mustard seeds in their jars and soaking. I'm really curious how these are gonna taste.

    I hope they swell up enough overnight to not fall through the mesh in the lids. Mustard seeds are pretty tiny. I'm anticipating casualties.

    edit to add- I bought these:

    [​IMG]

    Those legs are so when you rinse them, you stand the jar upside-down on a plate or in the sink to drain, and the legs give it space.

    I may get a sprout tray. I used to eat sprouts in my salads and foods pretty often. I bet if I walk around the local Asian and Indian groceries, I can find some interesting stuff to try (and I can get some mung beans pretty cheap.)
     
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    Last edited: May 7, 2021
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  4. John Brunner

    John Brunner Senior Staff
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    @Yvonne Smith

    I have a couple of questions:

    (1) I've been reading stuff on the internet and an concerned about the risk of e. coli. I thought the issue with the sprouts in the stores was outside contamination (as you see happens with lettuce sometimes), but what I am reading says the warm moist environment for normal growing is also ideal for growing bacteria. Do you take any special precautions?

    (2) You mentioned lentils and the "micro-green" stage. Does that mean you are just harvesting before you get full-sized sprouts?
     
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  5. Yvonne Smith

    Yvonne Smith Senior Staff
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    I do not see why e.coli would be a problem if you are growing your own sprouts, because you start with a seed, and it is only ever touched by you, and not even that until you harvest the sprouts.
    I don’t know about whether bacteria grows, but I have never had any sprouts that made me sick, and unless you did get sick, how would you even know what bacteria are growing ? We grow some things (like yogurt or sourdough) especially for the bacteria to develop and multiply, so I don’t know that this would be any different.

    Sprouts come before micro greens.
    I do my sprouts in a quart jar with the plastic lids like you have. To grow micro greens, a tray is better, and you let them grow until they are several inches tall and then just harvest the tops. With my lentil micro greens, I was able to get several harvests because they grew back again, but I don’t know about other kinds of micro greens.
    I put the micro green roots into the garden as compost after I harvested the tops, but on sprouts, you eat them soon enough that you will be eating them root and all.
     
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  6. John Brunner

    John Brunner Senior Staff
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    Thanks!

    What makes yogurt and bread dough different I believe are the natural sugars that inhibit the growth of bad bacteria. Heat may also play a role. I forget...I read about it when researching how to capture yeast out of the air (and why you don't get the bad critters along with it.)

    The general advice out there is to let the sprouts dry at least 8 hours before refrigerating them, and keeping them in the fridge for at least 48 hours before eating them. But this is the internet. Who knows what's really real.
     
    #21
  7. Yvonne Smith

    Yvonne Smith Senior Staff
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    I have never done that, and letting them dry would lose a lot of the fresh flavor. Since you are rinsing them several times a day, and they are rinsed just before you eat them, I think that takes care of everything. I like my sprouts as fresh as possible.
    Also, it might depend on what you are sprouting. I can maybe see doing something like that with bean sprouts, but not with delicate little sprouts like fenugreek or alfalfa.
     
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  8. Ken Anderson

    Ken Anderson Senior Staff
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    I think the risk of e.coli or any other contamination is far greater in something you might buy at the supermarket than in something you grow yourself, and if I am going to go through the process of growing them myself, I'm going to eat them fresh. But then, I eat stuff that I find growing in the woods, so what do I know?
     
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  9. John Brunner

    John Brunner Senior Staff
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    So less than 48 hours later and we have life!!!

    The fenugreek is not sprouting at the rate the mustard seeds are. In fact, there's only one or two white specs on the fenugreek to indicate any activity at all.

    Sprouts Sunday.jpg

    I've been looking at broccoli seeds online, since they seem to be the most popular and are the most anti-carcinogenic. It looks that the cheap ones have some negative reviews regarding the low sprouting rate. The expensive ones are not that much more expensive. I may also get a blend...one of them contains radish seeds.
     
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  10. Yvonne Smith

    Yvonne Smith Senior Staff
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    The fenugreek seeds look really dark colored, at least compared to mine. Mine is more the color of the middle jar. Do your seeds look like this picture ?
    Mustard seed is very tiny and fenugreek is much larger, and the middle jar looks more like larger seeds.


    CEEE71D9-7B86-4F9C-8760-C4A94B4E44BA.jpeg
     
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  11. Don Alaska

    Don Alaska Supreme Member
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    I don't think there is any significant danger from bacteria if you are sprouting your own, as long as you are using potable water. Commercial sprouts sometimes use water that has been exposed to other greens that could be exposed to E. coli. Not all E. coli is bad. After all, we are all full of E. coli if you gut flora is normal, so most E. coli is harmless to us. The dangerous E. coli is OH157:H7 which is in livestock guts, and is usually only overgrown in livestock, particularly cattle, that have been grain fed to fatten them.. Organic farms use manure to fertilize their crops, and the runoff as well as the crops themselves pose a hazard. Chemical farms have other hazards, but generally not this one. I have hear people state that you don't need to wash organic produce. Nothing could be further from the truth. Anyway, @John Brunner as @Yvonne Smith said, everything gets washed off with the multiple rinses, and, if there were anything left on your sprouts after washing, letting them sit a room temperature would be about the worst thing you could do, as it would allow incubation of the bacteria. Drying in the jar would not remove enough moisture to inhabit bacterial growth.
     
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  12. Bill Boggs

    Bill Boggs Supreme Member
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    Never heard of these first few sprouts. I have always lived in a concrete jungle
    and though had room it never occurred to us to plant our own greens. We did
    try green onions and tomatoes a time or two but concluded it a waste of time.
    Better to use extra time to earn more money to buy greens than to waste this
    time trying to raise something you didn’t know how.
     
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  13. John Brunner

    John Brunner Senior Staff
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    My fenugreek seeds are not that large, @Yvonne Smith , but you are correct. I swapped the label between fenugreek and brown mustard. How did I do that? Good catch!
     
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  14. John Brunner

    John Brunner Senior Staff
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    I thought the same thing, Don. I always believed the E. Coli issue to be one of contact contamination, not one of bacteria originating on the product itself. There are sites that say contamination can come from:

    -the water (use filtered or bottled water)
    -the container (sterilize or sanitize)
    -the seeds (should be treated with a 3% hydrogen peroxide solution @ 140° for 5 minutes)
    -your hands (use hand sanitizer before handing the seeds/sprouts)

    The advice to let them sit out & dry comes from Food & Nutrition Magazine published by the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics:

    I agree, I thought that advice to be a bit odd in the context of all the bacteria concerns.

    As I reread the sites, I think they are conflating the issue of commercially-grown sprout E.Coli outbreaks with one of general bad bacteria that might be found in the home.
     
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  15. John Brunner

    John Brunner Senior Staff
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    A guy in my neighborhood (lifelong resident) borrowed my roto-tiller that hooks on to the back of the tractor. He raises cattle and hay, and was putting in a personal garden for his wife. We were talking about the time and expense involved in having a veggie garden. A small one can be tough to cost-justify. I'm thinking that container gardening is probably the best option for folks who do not do volume and who do not can.
     
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