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If you’ve wanted to start growing your own sprouts, this is for you! I learned how to grow sprouts after becoming fed up with the expensive packages from the store getting slimy a day or so after buying them.
I’ve continued to sprout different types of seeds and encourage clients to also do this, since sprouts (especially broccoli sprouts) are so good for your liver detoxification.
So if you think that sprouting is hard to learn – it’s not!
In fact, it’s so easy that my husband who doesn’t even eat sprouts helps me. It takes less than a minute to care for them, and they add so much nutritional value to your meals.
To help you learn more about how to grow sprouts in a jar, the difference between sprouts and microgreens, AND how to keep the mold and slime away, I’m joined by Doug Evans, who is considered to be an early pioneer in the natural food industry.
In 2002, he co-founded Organic Avenue, one of the first exclusively raw, organic, and plant-based retail chains in the country. He then founded Juicero, the first fresh, farm-to-glass automatic cold-press juicer. Doug is now the founder of The Sprouting Company and lives in the Mojave Desert at Wonder Valley Hot Springs. He wrote The Sprout Book to teach people about the power of sprouts and how to start sprouting.
So let’s dive in!
Or, listen on your favorite app: iTunes (Apple Podcasts) | Spotify | Stitcher | TuneIn | Subscribe on Android
In This Episode:
- Why sprouts are so nutritious
- How to grow sprouts at home (to avoid the slimy store-bought ones)
- Difference between sprouts, shoots + microgreens
- Best method to grow sprouts (jar vs tray vs paper towel)
- Picking the right seeds to sprout to avoid glyphosate + low nutrients
- Food-borne illnesses + sprouts
- How to store sprouts so they last to avoid MOLD!
- Tips to add sprouts to your diet
- Beginner-friendly options to start your sprouting journey
Quotes
“For me, there's nothing better, fresher, healthier than consuming sprouts that you get to grow on your own.”
“So the sprouting seeds, you can have top shelf and bottom shelf. So just getting a seed from a bulk bin…in a grocery store. We don't know where it came from, we don't know how old it is, we don't know what it's been exposed to. So since we're using these seeds to grow food for you know ourselves and our family, we want to have the best.”
Links
Find Doug online | Instagram | Instagram | Tiktok
Get Doug’s book, The Sprout Book
Healthy Skin Show ep. 177: Liver Detox – Skin Rash Connection, PT 1
365: How To Grow Sprouts + Microgreens (To Support Liver Detox) w/ Doug Evans {FULL TRANSCRIPT}
Jennifer Fugo (00:14.011)
Doug, I am so excited to have you here on the show. I absolutely love sprouting, and you seem like the person to talk to about how to grow sprouts. Can you kick things off by explaining to listeners why sprouts are such a nutritious option to add to meals?
Doug Evans (00:35.094)
Well, for one, you get to grow the sprouts in your house. So the ability to actually co-create your own food is a magical experience. So that's number one. And by doing that, you are assured of the freshness. Okay, so aside from the fresh factor, the sprouts are hyper-nutritious. So they are 20 to 100 times more nutritionally dense than mature vegetables. They're like the stem cells of the vegetables. And what makes it evident is it's well-known that seeds are very nutritious. But seeds have a protective coating on them so that acts like a preservative. So that seed is a complete living organism in a dormant state that could last for years and there are recorded seeds that are 1200 years old that still sprout. But these seeds that you sprout with, you can take those seeds and then when you soak them, you remove the enzyme inhibitors, the phytic acid, the seed coat, the lectins, and you trigger a metamorphosis from a seed into a sprout and that sprout will grow in that first week period without soil, without sunshine, without fertilizer. So you're tapping into something that is incredibly bioactive and you get to consume this. So for me, there's nothing better, fresher, healthier than consuming sprouts that you get to grow on your own.
Jennifer Fugo (03:18.563)
And you bring up a really good point. I think most people think that sprouts are very expensive. And if you buy them at the store, they are expensive. And I think my main reason why I would say that is because they get slimy within like two days. I mean, I certainly have had the experience where I'll get a pack of broccoli sprouts, I'll open it up, it has that weird kind of odor and it's slimy and I'm like, oh, this is so depressing. And that was one of the reasons that actually inspired me to try to learn how to grow sprouts. So should we be sprouting seeds at home?
Doug Evans (04:10.414)
Correct, correct. I think, you know, look, people, when you buy sprouts in the market, and by the way, whenever I go to the farmer's market and whenever I travel, I buy sprouts outside, but they'll be anywhere from $3 to $4 to $5 a pack. And when you're sprouting on your own and you're buying seeds, you could sprout for say 50 cents a serving. So there's an enormous economic advantage as well as a freshness advantage by doing it on your own. But if you're buying it outside, I think they're good. You just have to use your common sense like buying anything that's on the fresh world. You wanna check the dates, you wanna open them up, you wanna smell them. The insight that I had was that sprouts were vegetables. And so that was it. Number one, vegetables to me are food. So sprouts were food; sprouts were vegetables. Number two, sprouts were vitamins and minerals.
Jennifer Fugo (06:06.255)
And I think most of the listeners are probably familiar with, if you're not, now you are, the benefits of incorporating broccoli sprouts into your diet. A lot of times, I'll make that suggestion to clients because of the role that sulforaphane plays in liver detoxification and how beneficial of a source broccoli sprouts versus just broccoli, like you were saying, it is a concentrated source of nutrients and that is true. That broccoli sprouts, for example, have a much higher concentration of sulforaphane versus that full-grown adult plant of broccoli.
So, we see all of these different terms, and this was something I noticed in your book, The Sprout Book, which is an excellent resource, and I highly recommend it. I have learned a ton about sprouting from this book. What is the difference between sprouts, shoots, and microgreens?
Doug Evans (07:07.067)
So they're all very similar, right? So they're all very similar. So they begin with a seed. So if you think about the journey of broccoli seed into broccoli vegetable that we're familiar with in the market.
So it starts with a seed and the seed germinates. So the seed will actually open up and a shoot and a root will come out of the seed. And in that first week period, that root and the shoot, if grown in the jar, will end up being kind of curly because it's in the jar, it's being rotated.
If it's grown as a microgreen, it's grown in a flat area. So the shoot is what comes up and the root is what goes down. So in the first stages, when you're eating the sprout in that first week, you eat the root, the shoot, the endosperm, the embryo, the testa, the seed coat, you eat it all. If you're growing it as a microgreen, the part that comes up is called the root, it's called the shoot, and what goes down into the sprouting medium, which could be a paper towel, like you've experimented with your arugula, right? It could be soil, it could be coconut, could be jute.
And so the root goes down, the shoot comes up. Microgreens are, and shoots are very similar. It's more of a naming part. So a lot of people call microgreen shoots, but the shoot is when you're eating the top part of the plant. When you're eating a microgreen, it's typically 14 days old. And when you're eating the microgreen, they cut it above the fold. So when you're eating the microgreen, you're not eating the root structure. So microgreens are more frequently eaten as a garnish and they're more mature. So microgreens could take 14 days to 21 days or longer. And they're grown with fertilizer and with soil. Yeah.
Jennifer Fugo (09:38.597)
Really? Wow. I always learn things about how to grow sprouts.
Doug Evans (09:48.563)
So that's the path of a microgreen versus a sprout versus a shoot. So shoots and microgreens are almost synonymous and sprouts are the earlier stage. And if we just, just to finish the thought, so after the microgreen stage, if you let it grow in soil, it'll grow into a broccoli vegetable.
Jennifer Fugo (10:01.403)
Gotcha.
Doug Evans (10:16.178)
If you let the broccoli vegetable grow further, it will actually flower. And then if you let it grow even further, the flower will fruit and have pods. And within those pods, there will be seeds and that circle of life continues.
Jennifer Fugo (10:36.935)
Well, you mentioned about my arugula. So just to give everybody a little bit, bring them up to speed… So I love to sprout. I wanted to show everybody I do actually sprout. These are my radish sprouts, almost ready. They're so good, so easy to grow. And I attempted this year to try to sprout arugula. And so I put it in the jar, the same way I did the radish seeds, because I was familiar with how to grow sprouts in a jar.
And it became very quickly apparent to me that something was wrong within a couple hours. Usually I would soak them and then they became gelatinous and I couldn't drain out all the liquid and I was like, okay, well maybe this is what's supposed to happen. And then it got stinky and some stuff did start to sprout but it's smell and I was like, oh, this is bad. And I had to throw it all away and I was really bummed. But you know, again, learning how to do things like sprouting and gardening and such involves failure.
Failure is an opportunity for us to learn. So then I went to your book and I learned that arugula seeds are gelatinous in nature and cannot be sprouted that way. Well, that is very true. And so now I am having success, as your book suggested, testing it out just on a paper towel.
Doug Evans (11:49.916)
Right.
Jennifer Fugo (11:57.955)
Because that was what was most readily available for me right now, rather than investing in all these types of sprouting trays and whatnot. I thought, let me just try with what I have here. And so, you know, aside from, I mean, your book has this amazing chart to know the difference between all of these different types of ways to sprout things. But generally speaking, is there a rule of thumb about which seeds can be sprouted in a certain way or in a like the jar versus other seeds that get sprouted or grown in a different way like a tray or in a bag? Are you talking about all these different options for how to grow sprouts?
Doug Evans (12:38.602)
Basically we're dealing with nature and there's a lot of variability with nature. So, you know, the primary seeds that are done in a jar are alfalfa, radish, clover, broccoli, lentils, and peas. And, you know, various legumes, various pulses can also be done in the jar. The ones that require soil are typically, or the unbleached paper towel that I like to use, are the gelatinous ones, the arugula, the flax, and the chia.
So other things like sunflowers, you could sprout sunflower seeds in a jar, but they're gonna be curly, as opposed to letting them grow where they're heliotropic, because they're looking for the sun, so they'll grow straight up. So, the shell on a sunflower seed is edible, right? It's cellulose, but may not be the most pleasant culinary experience to eat that shell. Whereas, you know, the shell that's on like a broccoli seed is more benign, it's smaller, and it dissolves quickly.
Jennifer Fugo (14:27.787)
So for somebody who's just starting out, somebody brand new to this who's like, I don't know, I wanna learn how to grow sprouts, but it sounds like a lot. Maybe they even have a black thumb and they've killed plants before. How would you suggest they get started with sprouting?
Doug Evans (14:45.914)
I think that there's a great kit at this where you could get a kit with say lentils and green peas. And the lentils and green peas grow in like three days and they're very strong, so that it's almost impossible to screw them up.
You add the water, you add the seeds, you soak them and then you can harvest them in two or three days. So that's what I would recommend to get started with. And the kit makes it all-inclusive. You get the jar, you get the stainless steel filter, you get a drip tray and a stand, everything's at the right angle, and there's good documentation and instructions to help someone along the journey very quickly.
Jennifer Fugo (15:46.211)
Yeah, it is. And just for everybody who saw my jar, this is literally.
I mean, I've had this jar lid for a long time. I think the steel ones are probably better because this doesn't get the best ventilation because it's a plastic top. But this is all you need. Like this is a jar I have at home and you can get these online to start learning how to grow sprouts in a jar. And as Doug said, he has a great resource, which we'll link up in the show notes for everyone about that. And I do have to ask Doug, this is a concern, obviously, like I go on to say Amazon or some seeds, what do you suggest in terms of looking for seeds that are appropriate for sprouting? Or could you just buy a pack of seeds, like broccoli seeds at the Home Depot, and sprout broccoli sprouts out of those?
Doug Evans (16:35.102)
Yeah, I mean, Jennifer, it's a really good question. And I've been devoted for sprouting for 30 years. And when I wrote the Sprout book and I got very serious about sprouting, it was really of the wild, wild west. And I purchased broccoli seeds that actually were for sprouting and I sent them to the lab because I wanted to know about glucoraphanin. I want to see if they had the sulforaphane in them and how much. And that's where I invest my dollars. And so I bought a bunch of seeds online from four different vendors. And one of them had like a medium level of sulforaphane potential. One had a little bit more. And then I got these pharmaceutical grade ones that were used to make supplements that were 70% higher in the sulforaphane and then there was one of them that came back with zero sulforaphane in it. Zero. So then I sent it out to another lab to be sequenced the DNA and they said well this isn't quite broccoli it's in the…
Jennifer Fugo (17:41.241)
Zero.
Doug Evans (17:57.754)
And that information really made me get these seeds, you know, find a packaging company and test everything. So that's what, you know, I did. If you see in the Sprout book, there's a whole chapter that's called Junkyard Dog that says, hey, you could sprout in anything. Go to your recycle bin, go into your cabinet. You could sprout in anything and here's a whole bunch of resources.
But then when I got very serious and I realized like, wow, sprouting is so accessible, it's so inexpensive, but if it's gonna go to scale and people are gonna be doing this and I'm gonna be recommending it to not just a few people, but millions of people, then I need to actually roll up my sleeves and do the work. The other thing that came back was that… There's a huge issue in this country about pesticides, in particular, Monsanto's Roundup, also known as glyphosate. So I made sure that all of the seeds from the sprouting company were tested for glyphosate and validated by a third party to ensure that there was no glyphosate residue on the seeds. So the seeds are glyphosate residue-free, certified organic, and tested for pathogens. So in the event that there was E. coli, Listeria, or Salmonella on the seed, we actually take a batch of the seeds, we soak them, we take the runoff water, send it to a lab to ensure that there's no trace of pre-existing pathogen on them, and then tested for the germination rate. So you could see on the back of every bag, it says germination rate, 90%, 94%, which is literally like counting out 100 seeds, sprouting them and seeing how many germinate, how many don't germinate. So I just did a lot of work.
Jennifer Fugo (20:12.899)
So it sounds like this, yeah, it sounds like this is not as simple as just like buying a little bag of seeds.
Doug Evans (20:23.306)
Well, first of all, like if you go in and you're just buying seeds in the gardening section at Home Depot, they're not selling enough seeds for you to actually have a meal. Like they're selling seeds by the ounce and like we're selling seeds by the pound.
So there's a big difference in doing it. And you don't save any money, you know, buying them by the ounce in the Home Depot. So I think that the big thing is you wanna have seeds that, you know, and I don't drink, but I like using the metaphor top shelf. So the sprouting seeds, you can have top shelf and bottom shelf. So just getting a seed from a bulk bin, you know, in a grocery store. We don't know where it came from, we don't know how old it is, we don't know what it's been exposed to. So since we're using these seeds to grow food for you know ourselves and our family, we want to have the best.
Jennifer Fugo (21:25.863)
Yeah. And when you go to sprout, do you wash the seeds at all? Cause I'm thinking of like the person who's just starting out learning about how to grow sprouts, like they might go, do I have to wash these?
Doug Evans (21:37.494)
So I wrote a lot about sanitation in my book, and basically, depending on where the seeds come from, right? So I would recommend, and we put this down as optional, that you could take sodium chloride or sodium hypochlorous, or white vinegar or any other rapid oxidizing agent, and you could soak the seed for between five minutes and 15 minutes in one of these agents, and they will reduce the microbial load, the bacterial load, you know, potential fungal load by three million to one in the five minutes, and then you rinse off those agents and you could soak.
So you can do that process, it's well documented. Do I do that all the time when I know where my seeds are coming from? No. Like I just, you know, I just go right into the soaking stage for germination. I do not do that. But I put it out there as someone wants to be extra careful. You know, like here's a protocol that they could follow.
Jennifer Fugo (22:56.399)
That makes a lot of sense. And I know that one question I always get is once you have sprouted or done your microgreens or whatever, how do you store them so that they last? Again, the idea is you buy it at the store. It may not last long, depending on where it's coming from. What's the best way to store the shoots, the sprouts, the microgreens?
Doug Evans (23:24.022)
So I've documented a process that when you're done sprouting, you can put them in the salad spinner, you could rinse them off, spin them dry, and then you could actually even leave them in the salad spinner or transfer them to a glass container that's not airtight because the sprouts are still respiring. So they're consuming oxygen and releasing CO2. So, or vice versa. So they need to be able to breathe.
Jennifer Fugo (24:33.123)
I love that. I know that the sprouts that I tend to grow can last about five to seven days, but you do have to make sure that they don't get slimy. Like you said, they're still respiring and you have to make sure that you have something, like you said, either have them… To be honest, the way I've stored them is with a lid on top, but I'll include a piece of paper towel and I'll swap that out every day to try to just keep the environment free from excessive water. Again, this is why I love doing this show because I always learn so much. And I know that one person had written in and asked me about mold growth. They were really concerned about sprouting specifically during the process of sprouting and then storing the sprouts about mold. So do you have any tips to share about how to avoid mold around sprouts?
Doug Evans (25:28.466)
I think you want to be in a very clean environment and you want to rinse the seeds properly. You want to start off with good seeds. So if there's mold, it's probably coming from the seeds itself at the beginning stages. Depending on where you are there could be some spores in the air. So if they land on the sprouts and you rinse them off and you're diligent about rinsing them twice a day, the mold isn't going to take hold.
Jennifer Fugo (28:07.779)
I love to hear that. Hopefully I can take a look at that paper and include that in the show notes because I think that would be a really helpful resource for those who are interested in learning how to grow sprouts to learn more about. I do have one question in terms of incorporating sprouts into your diet. I think most people, if they're thinking about what they can do with them, they might just think that they have to put them on top of a salad. That's basically it. A lot of people don't get creative. So…
What are some suggestions to incorporate sprouts into your diet? Can they be cooked? Or is that a big no-no? What do you suggest?
Doug Evans (28:47.414)
I prefer eating things that are fresh and that are raw. And that's the way that you're getting things. I think when you cook anything, especially vegetables, the vitamin C goes, the water evaporates, then it becomes less nutritionally available. Now some things are more when you cook them. But for the most part, they're not.
Jennifer Fugo (29:20.283)
So sprouts generally should not be cooked, is that correct?
Doug Evans (29:25.478)
Yeah, I mean, look, I think lentils, like people cook lentils all the time, like they're the staple of the plant-based diet around the world. But when you sprout a lentil, right, you keep it raw, you triple the vitamin C, you quadruple the antioxidants.
You're increasing the soluble and insoluble fiber and you're having something enzymatically rich. So, if you cook the lentils, they're still healthy, but they're not as healthy as eating them in a sprouted form.
Jennifer Fugo (30:06.075)
Fair enough. So my last question, for someone just starting out, I don't know if there's a quote-unquote gateway sprout that's super easy to grow, but what would the one sprout that you would recommend to a beginner try?
Doug Evans (30:23.122)
I'd say the most, the easiest sprouts to grow are the lentil sprouts, you know, in terms of the legume family or in the garden variety. I would recommend alfalfa sprouts. But I would say, like the salad mix from the sprouting company is a great variety of many different seeds that are tested to all work well together and so you can get a good variety there. But if just a single seed lentils are easy and alfalfa sprouts are easy.
Jennifer Fugo (30:54.659)
I will say and share that I think radish sprouts are really easy. It's my first time actually sprouting them this year. I think they're very easy to grow that they do take about five days, at least on my countertop. And I'll let you know. Everyone will find out when I know how the arugula sprouts turn out. But Doug, it's been so great having you here. Thank you so much for sharing your passion about sprouts with us. And I'm excited to share your website. I know you said this and you've got a couple of great Instagram accounts that are really educational. We'll link everything up. And then I don't want anyone to forget about the sprout book. Obviously you guys can see I got it marked up as a resource. Thank you so much for being here. I really appreciate your time.
Doug Evans (31:46.846)
My pleasure, Jennifer. Keep up the great work, and it was a pleasure speaking to you. And I hope everyone enjoyed this as much as we did.
