Sprouting Foods

If you don’t have your own greenhouse, wintertime can be a time when you don’t have much of your own home-grown fresh food. Sprouting can be a tasty and nutritious addition to the winter diet. When I first learned about sprouting, I also discovered there is an entire community of people who are really enthusiastic about it. I discovered the site, SproutPeople.org. By reading information and watching videos at their site, I was encouraged to try it out.

I purchased one of their Easy Sprout Sprouters and have found it to be very excellent. My favorite sprout (so far) is broccoli. Broccoli sprouts are simply yummy. They are great on salads or sprinkled on sandwiches (whole wheat, ham and swiss…).

To sprout broccoli, you first snap the extra filter piece (for small seeds) into the sprouter, then add 2-3 Tablespoons of broccoli seed. Rinse well to remove any dust and then add 1 cup cool water to the sprouter. Let it soak for 8-12 hours, after which you drain all the water out and shake it well to remove as much water as possible.

After two days of rinsing every 12 hours, the sprouts are looking good:

After 6 days, we have beautiful, delicious fresh broccoli sprouts. I have to admit that we used some early on salads as they were growing this week. They were quite tasty. Now that they have grown long enough, I dehulled them by covering them with water in a bowl, allowing the hulls to float to the top and skimming.

Using my salad spinner, I’ve got them as dry as possible, let sit for about another hour and refrigerated to keep them fresh and delicious.

SproutPeople have a great video demonstrating this process as well: