I love sprouting beans and seeds, hence the name of this blog. Whenever I visit the health-food shop or ethnic grocer I look out for new types of seeds and beans to try sprouting them.Recently at The Unicorn (a fantastic wholefood co-operative in South Manchester) I bought a bag of "sprouting mix" which contained sunflower seeds. I hadn't considered sprouting sunflower seeds before, but they sprout very well. This discovery led me to experiment with pumpkin seeds which also sprout well. And at Matta's (an international food shop in Liverpool) I got some raw buckwheat. That also sprouts well and very quickly, and you don't need to soak it overnight - an hour is plenty.
Through the winter, lettuce has not been available in my organic veg box, so fresh bean-sprouts have been the main ingredient in our salads.
Winter Bean Sprout Salad
Use your own sprouted beans or shop-bought ones. The familiar Chinese mung-bean sprouts will work fine, but if you have more interesting sprouts such as alfalfa, broccoli, chick-pea etc. that's even better. Now add whatever salad ingredients are in season. I've been adding grated carrot, chopped hothouse tomatoes (remove the seeds) and cucumber and finely chopped onion. The general rule I follow in making salads is to aim for a constant "particle size" - that is, try to chop everything about the same size as the main ingredient. So when I'm making rice salad everything gets chopped as small as I can and when I make sprout salad they can be a little bit bigger, but still fairly small (there are exceptions of course, I don't make potato salad with lumps of onion an inch across, it's just a rule of thumb). Now add a dressing. I have lots of dressing recipes. The simplest would be lots of ground black pepper, some sea salt and some freshly squeezed lemon juice. But feel free to use your own favourite salad dressing recipe (mayonnaise, especially home-made, adds a touch of luxury).
7 comments:
Mel, my own experiment with pumpkin seeds was a failure as the sprouts were very bitter. The tough seed coats didn't come off until the sprouts were nearly an inch long and beginning to get rootlets. Any idea where I went wrong?
My favourite salad dressing, which, as you know, goes excellently with rice salad, is, in this order into a screw-top jar - crushed clove garlic, salt, ground black pepper, 1 heaped tsp made English mustard,1 tbsp white wine vinegar, 2 tbsp olive oil; shake vigorously to amalgamate then chill for a couple of hours if possible (but not essential). Ring the changes with the vinegars, the oils or the mustards for variations. Enjoy.
Hedgewizard - these were dehusked pumpkin seeds from a hop. Did you use seeds saved from a pumpkin?
Have you tried sprouting quinoa? Apparently that's rather nice.
I have tried quinoa but it went mouldy. I wonder if there's some particular technique?
Thanks for the nice plug for Unicorn - I work there. I've had a bit of success with red quinoa (which we don't sell only regular quinoa). Best of all I like pea sprouts from those dried green bullets. They quickly grow to about a foot high with big strong shoots. They are big in countries like the Phillipines. I got the idea from someone's blog of Filipino food.
Yeppers, they were saved from our pumpkins harvest from last year, and had big strong husks on them. Since that seems to be the problem it adds weight to my idea of trying a naked-seeded variety, although I shall have to check their expected size - we like at least one big one for carving!
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