Growing Your Own Bean Sprouts for GF Chinese Food Recipes

Since my GF menu website is all about recipes kids can eat, I think it might be fun for a summer project, to show kids how to grow their own bean sprouts.

As I said in an earlier posting, I was taking a nutrition course at my local junior college, and this is one of the things they taught us: how to grow your own sprouts.

For this project, I'm using Great Northern Beans (see the picture), but it's possible to grow your own bean sprouts using lentils, kidney beans, black beans, or whatever kind of legumes you prefer. They do have slightly different flavors, but all bean sprouts are fantastically nutritious! And for our celiac kids, that's exactly what we need, right?

So here's how you start your bean sprouts:

1. Pour 1/4 cup of beans into the bottom of a mason jar. Cover these with water--maybe 1/2 cup of water or so. Let them sit in a window (in sunlight) for about 6 hours. 
2. Drain the water. They should be slightly damp, but they should no longer be submerged in water.
3. For the next few days, at the same time every day, rinse the beans with water and drain. It's not necessary to keep them in a window anymore.
4. When the sprouts reach a fair length, you can eat them--bean and all--and bean sprouts are especially good in Chinese stir fries, egg foo young, and sweet and sour dishes. (See my earlier postings for those gluten-free Chinese food recipes.) Sprouts are also great in salads.

If you'd like to see a video of how to grow your own sprouts, here's one that's fun and easy to follow.