Adventures in Sprouting: Chickpeas

There is a nutritional school of thought known as essential eating.  Briefly, the idea is to eat only real foods and in their most nutritious form.  This means buying organic and eating your legumes and grains in a sprouted form.  The idea is that when you sprout legumes and grains, they become easier to digest and increase their nutritional value.  If you want more information, click here or here.

Since P and I have decided to reduce our animal consumption, we need to increase our consumption of legumes for their protein.  One of our favorites is garbanzo beans, aka chickpeas.  I have a recipe for a chickpea curry that I really wanted to try, and I want to make some hummus, so I figured I would give this sprouting a try.

2 days ago, I opened a bag of Full Circle Organic Dried Garbanzo Beans, rinsed and then soaked them for 12 hours.

Next, I rinsed them in a colander and laid them in a pyrex baking dish, still moist, and set them in my oven so they'd be out of the way.

12 hours after that, I came to give them another rinse when I noticed that my garbanzo beans had sprouted.  WooHoo!

As P said, I am really boring.  This has truly excited me.  They are cutie patooties; chickpeas with little white tails.

I also have black beans that are currently in the oven, hopefully sprouting.  Every 12 hours, I will rinse them and drop them back in the dish.  I'm hoping that in another 36 hours, they will be as beautiful as my chickpeas.

Oh, and let me not forget my brown rice.  I soaked them overnight and now, they too have little white buds on the ends, too.  I feel like a sprouting queen princess.  Those black beans are still iffy.  I'm going to store my babies in the fridge for 3-5 days in an airtight container.

Next, I am going to try to sprout some wheat berries and make my own sprouted bread.  Now, to find some more time....