Monday, May 19, 2014

lupin sprouts

Sprouting lupins is not much different from sprouting any other kind of bean. In this post, I'll relate the sprouting method I used for Australian sweet lupins (which I purchased from Lupina), and highlight some differences I noticed between sprouting lupins and sprouting mung beans. Lupin sprouts are bigger and a bit tougher than mung sprouts, and their cotyledons are much more prominent. The sprouts don't have a strong flavor, but the cotyledons seem to have a faint cucumber taste to them. Any thing you can do with mung sprouts, I think you can do also with lupin sprouts. I made a salad from fresh sprouts, which was good. I also cooked some of them and put them in a stew, which was also good (although you can't really taste them in the stew...).

  1. Sort seeds to pick out rocks and remove any obviously damaged seeds.
  2. Soak seeds. 1-3 days. For most beans, 12 hours is sufficient. After 12 hours, more than half of the lupin beans will be nicely swelled, but a pretty good portion will still not be. The longer you soak for, the more beans will be swelled and ready to sprout. 3 days seemed to be long enough for 95% or more of the lupin beans to become swelled (I plan to look at this more scientifically in the future). I don't think over-soaking will effect germination rate, but it might be a good idea to change the water and let them breathe for a little while every day. Also, if you happen to have a wire mesh with about 0.6 cm between the wires, it should be easy to screen the unswelled beans from the swelled beans.
  3. After soaking, drain and put in a pot, or a large bowl, or any other large container with a cover. Put the cover on (I usually leave it open just a crack, the idea is to keep the humidity high, but you also don't want to suffocate them).
  4. Rinse and drain at least once every day. You need to be gentle with lupin sprouts, blasting them with water (as I do with mung sprouts) will cause the cotyledons to snap off which will prevent the sprout from growing any bigger (the cotyledons are what gives them the energy to grow).
  5. Do this for about 7 days, or until they are the desired size. At 7 days, some of them will have started making their first little leafs.
  6. Rinse, drain, eat, or refrigerate
  7. Do not attempt to remove the hulls. Sometimes with other beans, I remove the hulls by soaking the beans in a big pot of water and using my hands to agitate them so the hulls fall off, then just pouring the hulls off. Lupin hulls seem to be attached more firmly than the hulls of other beans. It's definitely possible to slip them off, but the only way I could find to get them off without also knocking the cotyledons off was to individually pull them off of each sprout. That was way more work than I was interested in doing, so I just left them on. The hulls are a bit chewy, which maybe some people won't like, but, it's good fiber, so you might as well just eat them...


  1. Where did you get your lupin beans? Were they the California sweet lupins or the type you buy from a grocery store?

    1. The only source of edible lupin beans I know of in the US is company from California called Lupina. Their website is
      They sell two kinds of lupin beans, the California sweet lupins, and Australian sweet lupins. The ones I used for this post were the Australian sweet lupins, which are smaller and kind of brown and speckled. I've also sprouted California sweet lupins (which are much larger and white), and
      they also make good sprouts. Hope that helps. Happy sprouting!