Mung Bean Sprouts
52-Week Salad Challenge and Mung Bean Sprout’sekeers
I’m having fun sprouting things. If socks could sprout, I’d probably be soaking those, too. Welcome to a new challenge: The 52-Week Salad Challenge.
Four days ago Monica Shaw inspired me to sprout mung beans. I mean look at this photo on her blog that she took this morning! Mung bean sprouts are the ones you find scattered on the top of Chinese food. Heck, I didn’t know those were mung beans! Did you? Yes, you probably did. As usual, I’m the last one to jump on the tram.
So, I bought a store-brand bag of dried mung beans, poured a small amount into a bowl, generously covered them with tepid water, and while I waited for them to sprout …. I decided I should read up on how it’s done properly.
For one of the clearest and easy to follow instructions I’ve read: How To Sprout Mung Beans. Others I’ve read just confused the mung out of me, and made me anxious about potential E.Coli infection caused by human slurry on fields in China where most mung beans are grown for export. Another blog emphatically stated that sprouts should ONLY be grown from dried mung beans meant for sprouting. A few of my online sprout’sekeers, which is like a musketeer who sprouts things, allayed my fears. They’d bought the same sort of supermarket mung beans and none of them keeled over and died. I was encouraged.
Day 2: My mungs had real sprouts measuring a few millimetres in length. Twice a day, morning and night, I rinsed them in tepid water and returned them to their jar or plastic tub where they did their thing under the cover of an open-weave muslin cloth.
Day 4: I was delighted to see something that appeared edible. The sprouts are 2-3 centimetres long, and curiosity overwhelmed me. I had to taste some of them.
I made a snack-size salad of cubed mango, dried diced Bing cherries, home-grown *parsley and *basil, shaven flecks of frozen *jalapeño peppers grown last summer, my *sprouted mung beans, all tossed in a light dressing of 1 tablespoon fresh lemon juice, 1 tablespoon olive oil, and 1 tablespoon fizzy lemonade. (*all home-grown)
This is my first sprout contribution to the 52 Week Salad Challenge which can be following on Twitter using #saladchat Do join in and add your blog page link by visiting the 52 Week Salad Challenge blog, link above.
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11 thoughts on “Mung Bean Sprouts”
What a fantastic salad you made using your sprouted mung beans!
Mandy
And now I’m searching out more things that I can sprout!
I love them as you know. i have a jar sprouting on the bench at all times through the winter. We eat them every day, it is so hard to get a good source of fresh green in the winter out here.. and mung beans are my favs, though broccoli is the best for you.. just make sure you only use seeds that have not been treated for sowing in the ground, some of those have a fungicide on them.. lovely post c
Celi, do you still have broccoli unharvested? Nah, can’t be. Are you sprouting broccoli? You aren’t buying it in the shops are you? (gasp!) Noted on the sowing type mung beans. I can only assume that since I bought them in the supermarket with all the other dried pulses and lentils that they’re free of that nonsense. I didn’t see any organic dried beans, which I thought was a bit odd. Now I’m going to have to search ‘broccoli’ on your blog!
A wonderful result and I’m totally drooling over that salad! I bet the sweet fruit with the mung beans is perfection. And with jalapeno? Sold. Beautiful post and thanks for the mention. You’ve inspired ME to think beyond the egg fu yung with MY bean sprouts.
I was thinking pear at first but I thought the flavours were too close, and they’d lose their individual ‘voices’ in the salad. And yes, chilli peppers are perfect with mango and papaya. If you grow your own jalapeño peppers, let them ripen totally until they turn red before harvesting for use. When red there’s still heat but they won’t have the ‘green’ under-tone to them. Egg Fu Young is lovely, but ppffffft, we can do better than that.
I love your “experiment” and it’s an obvious success! The mango salad looks like a delicious combination of sweet and crunchy… lovely!
Thanks, Smidge. The mango salad is a bit sweet and sour plus crunch because of the dressing. The lemon juice rather than vinegar works well.
Welcome to the Challenge and thanks for your wonderful ideas on what to do with mung beans. If you have e. coli fears then the key thing to do is to start with v clean equipment and rinse the seeds regularly just like you’ve been doing. NB sprouted mung beans don’t store as long as some of the other sprouted seeds.
My current sprouted favourites are puy lentils and chickpeas – not in the same jar though!
Thank you for the warm welcome and advice on sprouting methods. I look forward to contributing more to your project in the future. I was a little disappointed that my husband didn’t like the mung bean sprouts as much as I do, so perhaps I’ll have to try sprouting chickpeas.
[...] Misk Cooks is also sprouting mung beans and made a beautiful salad of cubed mango, dried diced Bing cherries, parsley, basil, jalapeño, and sprouted mung beans, all tossed in a light dressing of lemon juice, olive oil and… whoa… fizzy lemonade! [...]