Leveraging the Mung

There's always something sprouting about the place (though sadly for many years now it hasn't been my hair).  As well as the old standbys mustard and cress, there’s a whole range of more exotic sprouters available these days:  if you can't find them at the garden centre, try an online merchant like Thompson-Morgan. A couple of favourites are fenugreek - the heady scent when you start the seeds off is a delight in itself - or red cabbage with its dramatic colour. You can grow them in a warm place any time of year, and I use a bit of potting compost rather than kitchen paper:  a great way to use up things like those little plastic hummous cartons and similar bits of packaging.  They make great "live" presents too, at minimal cost.

Moving up the size spectrum, and my absolute favourite, is the humble mung bean. You can buy them at any decent supermarket, growing them is (or literally could be) child’s play, the taste is far more electric than any plastic-wrapped version, and there’s a rather elemental quality to eating something that’s actually alive as you pop it in your mouth – a kind of vegan version of swallowing a still-throbbing scallop.

First you need to assemble your sprouting kit - you can buy commercial sprouters but you wouldn’t want to of course, when you can use recyclings.

Here’s my highly sophisticated kit:

The components are:

• Two punnets, approximately 18x13x5 cm, one with holes punched at 1cm intervals (the sieve-punnet)
• Something a little bigger for the base
• An old linen napkin, or a piece of muslin (something that wont shed lint anyway)
• Some stones

Why the stones? Well, for some reason the beans sprout better if they are weighted down:  they're literally lifting weights down there in the sprouty gym, and they come up all the more muscular for it. You could use any other kind of weight, but you need about a half a kilo, equally distributed across the bottom of the punnet.

Here’s what you do:

• First, tip some beans into to the sieve-punnet so that they just cover the base in a single layer. For this size of punnet around 50g should be about right
• Rinse the beans and then leave them overnight in a bowl of water
• The next day, tip the soaked beans into the sieve-punnet and rinse them again. Soak your napkin or muslin and wring it out lightly (so it's still pretty wet), then fold so that it neatly covers the beans. Now place your weighted punnet on top of the cloth – it should fit nicely into the sieve-punnet. Put the whole assembly on to the base, to catch the water that will drip through
• Put the kit into an airing cupboard or similarly warm, dark place and leave overnight
• The next morning, rinse the beans in the sieve-punnet, rinse the cloth and again wring lightly, reassemble everything and put it back in the airing cupboard
• Repeat the above until the beans have sprouted to about 5-6cm (2”). This normally takes 3-4 days 

Here's your glorious harvest, fabulous for salads and stir fries, or just to eat by the handful as a snack:

 As an unreconstructed banker, I can’t help thinking of the amazing environmental and financial "leverage" you achieve by sprouting your own beans - leverage of the right kind, not the variety that brought the global financial system crashing.


Leaving aside the wonderful taste and health-giving properties of your completely fresh sprouts, here’s a calculation of that leverage for a 500g bag of mung beans:

• First, a mouthwatering financial return of 400% in a few days - each 50g of beans will have become 300g of sprouts. A 500g bag costs £ 1.20, but the equivalent in sprouts would have cost £4.80. You've used heat from your airing cupboard, so there are no additional costs except some water.  Your own time will have totalled 5 or 6 minutes.  Even the most aggressive denizen of Wall St doesn't make those kinds of returns any more!
• Second, you’ve saved the heating, plastic packaging, and transport costs on 10 packets of supermarket beansprouts
• Not to mention the scarce water if they were grown outside the UK
• And finally, your sprouting kit has not had to go anywhere to be recycled (another use for those pesky punnets that supermarkets are so obsessed with)

But there’s an even more philosophical fancy I have as I sprout my mung. For as they push up in the darkness under their heavy weight, they seem to somehow symbolize the oppressed of all ages - with every condition ranged against them, yet still irrepressibly alive and bursting out of their bonds, each a sturdy little soldier in the struggle against tyranny and injustice.

(And then, of course, I go and eat them.)