Home Sprouting to create your Daily Low-Carb Salads

On low-carb/keto diets, you are generally allowed your 2 salads a day, as in original Atkins. But that can be difficult! I live alone, and I’m in a rural area. And I was brought up to hate wasting food. When I buy lettuce as a salad base, I usually end up with some spoiled lettuce, whether I buy head lettuce or bagged salads. Especially when I’m doing full-day fasting from time to time during the week!

I finally wised up a bit and bought cabbage as a salad base. I bought bagged coleslaw mix, and since I again skipped some days of salad eating due to fasting and to just not wanting to eat those salads, I again had some not-so-fresh shredded cabbage at the bottom of the bag. I suppose I could have fed it to my chickens and ducks, but I put extra Spike (seasoning) on it and ate it. It was OK.

The best way I have found, however, is to base my salads on salad sprouts such as alfalfa and clover sprouts. I have been sprouting for years, even back when I was a vegetarian. I used to use just those canning jar based sprouters with plastic sprouting lids that fit wide-mouth canning jars, but now I have found a better way— the Vittorio sprouters. 

A Vittorio sprouter is made up of stacking round sprouting trays. You can start up a new one each day and stack them to save space. I put my sprouters at the top of a set of plastic shelves in the middle of my kitchen. It is a warm-enough spot in winter, and being away from the windows doesn’t dry out sprouts in summer. And on the top shelf, my cats don’t feel the need to knock it on the floor in their redecorating efforts.

I learned a lot about sprouting seeds from the ‘Sproutman’ Steve Meyerowitz’s books ‘Sprouts, the Miracle Food’ and ‘Sproutman’s Kitchen Garden Cookbook.’ He has a business called The Sprout House which sells sprouting seeds and the kind of sprouters he recommends. (I have tried his recommended basket sprouters and prefer the neatness of the stackable Vittorio sprouters.)

How to sprout salad sprouts

First, get a good sprouter, and put it in a good location. Many sprouting failures happen because people put their sprouters in a forgotten corner of the house which leads them to forget the twice-daily rinsings. 

Second, buy some sprouting seeds. Alfalfa seeds are a good place to start. I prefer a mix of seeds called ‘Broccoli and Friends’ from Todd’s Seeds, which I purchase from Amazon.com. It contains broccoli, clover, red radish and alfalfa seed. I’ve also sprouted just plain clover seed, but I don’t like that very much. Clover sprouts seem to me better in a mix.

‘Sproutman’ says that larger legume sprouts, like mung bean sprouts, pea sprouts, and lentil sprouts should be steamed before eating. There are salad mixes that contain some larger legume sprouts, mostly lentil sprouts. I wouldn’t use those unless I planned to make a lightly steamed salad!

I use about 1 teaspoon of seed for one tray of the Vittorio sprouter. I have used a bit more or a bit less. Pre-soak the seed for a few hours or overnight. One sprouting book author, Jim Beerstecher, recommends soaking as long as 24 hours. Soak it too long, however, like two or three days, and you will drown some of the sprouting seeds.

After soaking, pour the water and seeds into your sprouter. The Vittorio sprouter has a solid, green bottom tray to catch the water and a top non-solid green tray for the top to prevent your seeds drying out. Make sure you use these trays if you have a Vittorio!

Sprouts are usually watered twice daily. If you are in a hot, dry climate, you may need to do it more often. Be sure and drain the sprouts after rinsing. And before you water sprouts in a Vittorio sprouter, check the bottom, water-catching tray to make sure it is empty. You don’t want the water to overflow!

Alfalfa and related salad sprouts need 7 days of sprouting. They should be exposed to some degree of light so they turn green. When ready to eat, take the amount of sprouts desired and put in a filled bowl of cool water. Swish the sprouts around so that any seed hulls or unsprouted seeds are eliminated.

I often eat these salad sprouts as a finger food, without anything. But you can do anything you do with a lettuce salad with a sprout salad. You can add other salad veggies, you can salt it, you can also add Spike or Mrs. Dash as a seasoning along with the salt, and you can use any low carbohydrate salad dressing. If you like salad dressing. 

If you take out half a tray’s worth of sprouts for a salad, you can keep the rest in the tray and keep watering it. If you develop a backlog of sprouts, you can put them, tray and all, into the refrigerator. Continue to rinse it once daily. It will keep longer in the cool environment. You can also feed extra sprouts to greens-eating pets and livestock. My poultry loves sprouts, especially in winter.

Sprout salads for the mostly-carnivore eater

While human beings can live on a 100% meat diet, few historical hunter-gatherer tribes have done so. If you are mostly carnivore, especially if you eat salads only some of the time, sprouting is great because you can sprout only as much as you want, and only when you are in a sometimes-salad-eating phase of your life. Your sprouting seeds will keep for quite a while— mine have still sprouted after a year or two.  Sprouts are quite nutritious— certainly more so than iceberg lettuce. 

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