Sprouting: The Easiest Way To Grow Sprouts At Home
If you can’t get enough fresh sprouts and love adding them to your sandwiches or salads, this helpful guide will show you how I grow an almost never-ending supply at home for a fraction of the cost.
Ounce for ounce, sprouts are one of the most nutritious foods. They are jam-packed with vitamins, minerals, phytonutrients, amino acids, and fiber, and are low in fat and calories. They add a nice texture and crunch to sandwiches and salads and are so ridiculously easy and cheap to grow at home. I usually have at least two different types of sprouts growing at any one time, like clover sprouts and mung beans, or broccoli sprouts and fenugreek. It’s nice because you always have fresh sprouts on hand and growing them requires minimal effort. You don’t need even the slightest green thumb.
Benefits Of Eating Sprouts
- High in Nutrients
- Low in Calories
- Easy to Digest
- Rich Source of Plant-Based Protein
- Boosts Immune System
How Much Do Sprouts Cost vs Sprouting?
Buying fresh sprouts at the store can add up to be pretty expensive. At the time of this writing, one four-ounce container of mixed sprouts is $3.99 where I’m located. To grow as many sprouts at home, it might require about a tablespoon of seeds and you can buy three pounds of sprouting seeds for around $20. That’s only $0.43 cents a tablespoon. To put that into perspective, you can either buy about five containers of fresh sprouts at the store, or you could grow 46 containers worth of sprouts yourself at home for around the same price in seeds. And it’s super easy to do.
Growing Sprouts at Home: What’s Needed & How-to
To start growing sprouts at home, there are only a few things you need. Once you have the supplies, you can get started growing your own sprouts. It only takes a couple of days and then you’ll have a nice supply of fresh sprouts that you can pull from to add to sandwiches or salads or anything else you’d like to put them in to add a nice earthy crunch.
Sprouting Supplies: Everything You Need For Sprouting
If you have wide-mouth mason jars, all you need are sprouting lids for mason jars and seeds. This is actually one of the best products that I’ve found to use for growing sprouts because they have really nice airflow.
When I first started growing sprouts, I got an expensive ceramic stackable sprouting container. Using that, my sprouts ended up getting moldy and slimy because there wasn’t enough airflow getting to them, and on top of that the seeds got stuck in the little holes and I had to pick them out with a toothpick. Super frustrating. Don’t waste your money on anything fancy, just use mason jars and get these sprouting lids for them. You really don’t need anything else. I’ve never had any seeds get stuck in the mesh screen of the lids or escape through when you’re rinsing, and the mesh screens have never rusted on me either.
As for seeds, you can get whichever sprouting seeds you like. I most often grow these clover seeds because they grow fast and they’re pretty inexpensive. Broccoli seeds also grow fast into nice little broccoli shoots. Get whichever seeds you like best or that you eat the most.
Types of Seeds to Sprout
While this isn’t an exhaustive list of seeds that you can grow for sprouts, here are some of the more common ones.
- Broccoli
- Clover
- Alfalfa
- Mung Bean
- Fenugreek
- Mustard
- Radish
- Lentil
How To Grow Sprouts – Video
Step-by-Step Instructions for Growing Sprouts at Home
For growing sprouts at home, gather a 32-ounce wide-mouth mason jar and a sprouting lid, and measure out two tablespoons of seeds.
Add the two tablespoons of seeds to the mason jar, and fill the mason jar about halfway with water. Slosh it around or stir it with a spoon to loosen any clumps of seeds and to let any little air bubbles rise to the top.
This is the initial soak to wake the seeds up so they start to grow, also called the germination phase. On the packaging of most sprouting seeds, it will usually tell you how long to soak them for. If it doesn’t, just soak them for eight to twelve hours, on the longer side of that for larger seeds, then drain them.
From there, just rinse the sprouts with fresh water twice a day, once when you wake up in the morning and again at night before you go to bed. Keep the sprouting jar in a darker corner of your kitchen while they grow. Once they’re big enough to eat, you can put them in a window to give them a little sunlight to develop nice green leaves.
Before you know it, you’ll have a mason jar full of fresh sprouts that you can enjoy at home. For them to grow from seed and sprout, it usually only takes about a week until you can harvest them.
For An Almost Never-Ending Supply
For a continuous supply of fresh sprouts, start a new mason jar every two to three days until you have 3-5 sprouting jars in different stages of growth. Once you finish eating one jar, rinse the jar and start a new batch of seeds and continue eating fresh sprouts from the next jar. Readjust the number of jars you have for sprouting based on how fast you consume them and you’ll have your own little sprouts farm that you can rely on for fresh micro greens.
There you have it, an almost never-ending cycle of fresh sprouts grown at home for a fraction of the cost of buying sprouts at the store.
How To Eat Sprouts
You can eat sprouts in many different things. My favorite is to add them to sandwiches. They’re great in salads or wraps. They add extra nutrition to a smoothie, and some types of sprouts like mung bean are deliciously cooked into things like pad thai or served on top of phở, a Vietnamese noodle soup. They’re also delicious sauteed in a little sesame oil and served alongside some kimchi or tteokbokki.
Keep in mind, it is important to make sure your sprouts are healthy and clean before eating them. Make sure there is no mold or sliminess so you don’t get sick. Other than that, keep sprouting on!
Did you grow sprouts after reading this? Tweet me a pic @SpicedPalate! I’d love to see how they turned out.
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