How To Sprout Wheat Berries

Sprouting wheat berries is trouble-free and well worth the three-day wait that it takes for them to grow into nourishing little green sprouts. Once the small berries develop a small sprout on the end they become what is classified as a “living food”, and are ready to be eaten as sprouts. Raw fruits and vegetables that have never been cooked are considered to be “living foods” and are the most beneficial to our health.

Live foods, like wheat berry sprouts, have miraculous amounts of cell restoring properties that help repair and build up our system towards resistance to sickness and disease. This is one reason why eating raw foods is so important in our daily diet - eating four to five servings of live/raw foods daily is absolutely imperative to having good health.

Two or three servings of your raw food intake can be from your very own wheat sprouts that you grow yourself! Wheat sprouts are excellent in salads, soups, and tossed on any cooked food, such as rice, pasta, and vegetable stir fry dishes. When the stir fry is finished cooking, and it is taken off of the heat, toss in several heaping tablespoons of sprouts to the dish or add them to your own dish for extra nutrition. Wheat sprouts are very tasteful and add a nutty like flavor and chewy texture to the foods.

Sprouting wheat is an easy way to have fresh, nourishing sprouts for your favorite foods at anytime. Your smaller children will truly enjoy helping you to bring to life these small wheat kernels and they will probably like the nutty flavor they bring to your dishes. Wheat berries are already nutritious just as they are for making breads and other whole wheat foods, imagine how much more nutritious they will be after they develop into a living food – the wheat sprout.

The nutritional content of the wheat berry quadruples in some of the vitamins and minerals through the sprouting process. For example, once the wheat berry is sprouted, vitamin B-12 quadruples, other B vitamins increases 3 to 12 times, vitamin E content triples, and the fiber content increases three to four times that of whole wheat bread! According to research undertaken at the University of Minnesota, sprouting increases the total nutrient density of wheat berries. Here is an example of what happens to the wheat berry once it sprouts. It’s absolutely amazing!

• Vitamin B1 (thiamin) increase of 28%
• Vitamin B2 (riboflavin) increase of 315%
• Vitamin B3 (niacin) increase of 66%
• Vitamin B5 (pantathenic) increase of 65%
• Biotin increase of 111%
• Folic acid increase of 278%
• Vitamin C increase of 300%

You will need a wide mouthed quart sized pickle jar, or other jar, and a fine mesh strainer and cheesecloth. Fill the jar half full of water, add three tablespoons wheat berries and let stand over night. The next morning strain and rinse the wheat berries using a fine mesh strainer. Cover jar with a terry cloth or mesh screen and hold it in place with a rubber band.