How to Make Homemade Non Bitter Mung Bean Sprouts Tutorial

I have a love affair with east Asian cuisine, and bean sprouts play a big role in such food. I've known how to make sprouts since I was a kid, but though I love sprouts, I hadn't made bean sprouts in years, and instead bought them from the grocery store instead. 

You see, grocery bought bean sprouts, made from mung beans, are crisp, long and straight and thick with a nice bite to it, and lightly sweet with a very subtle bean flavor. My homemade bean sprouts were curly weird looking, without any of the thick parts, and bitter. There was no point in making bean sprouts at home if they left me with an inferior product. I mean, I like homemade stuff because they are better, and I won't make the effort to do something from scratch if what I made isn't even good.

But lately I've been ramping up my production of Asian food, and buying box after box of mung bean sprouts from the grocery store was annoying, especially since they don't have the longest shelf life. So I wanted to see if there was a way to make homemade mung bean sprouts that taste just like store bought stuff. Or at least very similar.

I took to the internet, read lots of articles, watched lots of videos, in search of how to make the perfect mung bean sprouts.

And finally, I hit the jackpot. Now that I did it, I wanted to share this knowledge with you, so that you could also make this yummy vegetable for pennies.

How to Make Homemade Non Bitter Mung Bean Sprouts Tutorial

Ingredients:

Mung beans

Water

Tools:

Jar or cup

Wide bottomed strainer or steamer

Thin large cloth

Dark large cloth

Instructions

1. Line your strainer or steamer with a cloth, if necessary, and measure out enough mung beans to cover only half of the flat surface at the bottom of the strainer or steamer.

2. Remove any broken beans, and soak in water for 12 hours, waiting for the mung beans to at least double in size by absorbing water.

3. Line your strainer or steamer with your thin cloth, pour your soaked mung beans into it (making sure to remove any that did not swell up), cover with the rest of the cloth, and run under the sink to get the cloth thoroughly wet.

4. Cover the entire strainer/steamer with a dark cloth, and set it aside.

5. Every 12 hours approximately, run your strainer under running water for a few minutes. Don't jostle around the beans too much, let them stay in the same place. (This was one mistake I made, trying to sprout my beans in a jar and shaking them around, so that they didn't end up with a straight sweet thick sprout.)

6. If you uncover your sprouts, and let sunlight get on them, they will be bitter. Keep the dark cloth on if you don't want it bitter. (Another mistake I had been making.)

7. After a few days, you should see the sprouts starting to look like sprouts. Once it gets to that point, pull out one sprout. You first will see a little curly thin root, but if you let it sprout more, it will start growing upward, in a thick, straight, white sprout. When the thicker part first appears, let it go another two or three days, checking their size, and their taste.

8. When they've reached the size you want, remove the cloths, rinse well, and then dry very, very well. If you don't dry these well, they'll spoil quickly.

9. The biggest difference you'll notice between these sprouts and store bought sprouts is that you'll see tiny branching roots at the end of the thick part of sprouts. You can cut these off if you want, but there's really no reason to, they don't taste bad and it's just extra work for nothing.

10. Enjoy having this cheap vegetable, a nice addition to your diet.

And if you have so many sprouts and you aren't sure what to do with them, you can always make them into mung bean sprout soup...

Or mung bean sprout salad (recipe coming soon)...

Or put them into bibimbap...

Or put them in chop suey...

Or in curry laksa soup.

And on and on and on.

The sky is the limit. Now that you know how to make your own sprouts that are just as good as the store bought stuff.

Are you a fan of bean sprouts? Do you make yours yourself or do you buy them? If you make them yourself, do yours end up bitter or just like store bought? If yours end up like store bought, what technique do you do to get yours just right? Does this look like something you'd try out?