Sprouts
My sprouts are sprouting, hurray!
The mung beans have actually been very sprouty for a while — I’ve been nibbling them already, and threw a good half cup into last night’s vegan Kung Pao Chik’n. The broccoli sprouts were proving more reticent, but today they seemed to hit critical mass and I can really see them bursting out of their seeds. Very cool.
On the sprouters themselves, I can see why stacked multi-tiered sprouters are popular. They let you sprout different kinds of seeds simultaneously, and/or stagger your sprouting to get a more regular ‘crop.’ With my two sprouters I can’t start any new seeds until the current ones are ready. Or until I get more mason jars. 
The one specially-made sprouter I’m using is a “Tony Hornick’s sprouter.” It’s basically a metal sieve that sits on top of a plastic dish, with a plastic dome to go overtop. You put your seeds into the sieve, and put water in the dish below. Rinse the seeds/sprouts twice daily, and in a few days you get sprouts. This works well for big seeds like my mungs, but the sieve would never work for the broccoli — the seeds are too small and would fall through. Also, a couple spots on the sieve are already starting to rust from the constant moisture! So while I was originally impressed by its ease of use, I don’t think it’ll be an ideal solution in the long run.
Heather Fraser Fawcett said,
March 28, 2008 at 10:00 pm
I used to use a large mason jar stored in a dark cupboard for sprouting mung beans. You have to rinse and refresh the beans daily (and drain well!!!).
Yummy results though I never liked cleaning the seed “shells” off after the sprouts had sprouted. Any good tricks for that?
Corbet said,
March 31, 2008 at 2:27 am
To get the seed ’shells’ off, you can put the sprouts through a quick bath as part of your daily rinsing. The hulls float and the sprouts sink, so you can just skim off the hulls and then drain and rinse the sprouts per usual. If you do this each day, you’ll get most of the hulls off by the time the sprouts are ready to eat.