I have been eating so many sprouts lately, throwing them in with every wrap I make. The super market I usually shop at usually carries mung and alfalfa sprout, and I usually fly threw them. I decided it would well be worth my time to sprout my own so I went to a not so local farmers market near my mother’s house and purchased some organic garbonzo beans. I’ve just measured out about 1.5 cups an submerged them in water and will check them in the morning, dump the water and refill again. I’ve heard the water is good to water your plants with, being filled with nutrients that I am guessing are leached from the soaking beans…what can it hurt? I will water my new Amaryllis plant with it.
After 1 day of soaking and now 2 days of repeatedly rinsing and draining the beans I am starting to see little sprout tips peaking out of the beans! When I rinse them out the water smells very much like a fart. I can see some people not sprouting their own beans just due to that, although I bet other beans smell less. I did end up watering my Amarylis plant with the soak water, and it is about to bloom. I will include pics of that in this post for the hell of it once it blooms.
Here’s the sprout tips starting to show:
Two more days later, after rinsing every 4 hours or so the sprouts were looking really good, but unfortunately smelling super bad. I took a picture to document the progress of the sprouts, but the whole mess got dumped into the trash because the smell was nearly rancid (think foot + wet dog + old sink pipe + fart), and a good number of the beans were looking gross as well (i.e., darker color than usual, somewhat purplish and as if moving towards the black color of rotting foodstuff). I suspect that I had too many beans in the dish, and did not drain them thoroughly enough during rinses,letting the lower tier of beans stay moist and promote rot, bacteria, and other gross snotty stuff. Here’s the pic…the srpouts did look like they were coming along nicely, but man, I wish I could post the smell in this entry as well. YACK!
So, it is with a heavy heart that I abort this mission for now. I will read up on the topic of sprouting some more and come back better equipped to kick some sprouty ass!