Growing Bean Sprouts for Health and Your Budget

 

Growing bean sprouts may seem foreign to you, but it is an easy DIY project that can save you money on your food bill and improve health on many fronts. Adding bean sprouts to your diet can help conditions such as bone density, the metabolism, digestion, heart disease, better regulate cholesterol to the appearance of your complexion just to name a few. The reason growing bean sprouts can better your life in this way is due to all the nutrition sprouted beans have with their proteins, vitamins and various minerals. Therefore, you may be wondering what is the best way to go about growing bean sprouts.

We prefer growing bean sprouts in a tall jar with a mesh lid that locks over top. If you don’t have what I may be describing, you can still do this jar method with a change. Get any tall jar with a wide mouth and a piece of cheesecloth and a rubber band to cover and seal it over your jar.

Our beans of choice are usually mung beans, but you can also use soy beans. All that you do basically is rinsing and draining for a few days until whatever beans you pick decide to sprout.

What I do is to soak about one-third of a cup of mung beans (the amount you use depends on the size of your jar) with tepid water in my jar overnight. Adding too cold water can shock the beans and keep them from growing. On the same note, too hot of water can instantly kill them even before they have a chance to get started. After pouring in the water over my beans, I cover with my mesh lid or you can use the cheesecloth and a rubber band.

I like to keep my jar of growing bean sprouts on my countertop in my kitchen. You don’t have to keep them there, but you need to keep them from direct sunlight like placing on a window seal or where a stream of sunlight can hit them. This is important because exposing them to the sun gives them a bitter taste. Growing beans sprouts works out for your taste buds if you keep them in a darker place.

 

The next day, I just drain and rinse my mung beans. Some of the beans have begun to sprout because they now may have little tails when you check out the growth. Add fresh water and give your beans a thorough stir. Remember to stir because you don’t want to subject them to developing mold. Before I close up my jar again on that second day, I give them more room temperature water to cover them.

By the third day, I drain my growing bean sprouts the next morning. I add more fresh water and stir again to help the process for healthy growth. Then I do the same thing over, drain and refill my jar to cover the growing bean sprouts with fresh water.

However, I do alter something different later that night of my third day growing bean sprouts. I rinse them again, thoroughly stir what is growing in my jar, and then drain once more before adding fresh water again.

You will be surprised that by the fourth day of rinsing, draining and refilling of your water that your efforts will finally pay off in bean sprouts that will be ready to eat.

To ready them for eating, I just grab a colander and drain the contents of my jar. Here is where you weed out any green shells that may be clinging or undeveloped beans. I quickly go through my colander before rinsing and draining again.

After this rinsing, I transfer my grown bean sprouts to a cookie sheet that I had lined with a few paper towels and spread as thinly as possible over it. Then I get another clean paper towel and try to zap up as much of that moisture as I can before storing my bean sprouts in a covered container in my refrigerator until ready to use.

I hope that you try growing bean sprouts at your home because it really is a simple process once you do it a few times.