Salads like this make you forget all the longings for a good tomato and other things the past summer was abundant with. Instead, you will be grateful that the winter is almost here with its cheerful, delicious and super-nutritious produce.
The base of the salad is the sprouted mung beans. I have gotten the idea from Ulli. We met at my breakfast club a month ago, and I wondered why our paths had not crossed before: both of us live in Moda and both are passionate about eating healthy. Ulli is a certified Ayurveda consultant and yoga therapist who teaches her clients to live and eat in sync with their bodies. She is such a fascinating person that I am planning to tell you more about her one day, but for now - to the sprouted mung beans.
When Ulli invited me for dinner at her place, I was thrilled. Yes, by the sound of the menu - creamy soup of chard and nettle, hamsili pilaf with goji berries instead of the traditional currants and jasmine rice instead of the more starchy local variety plus salad of sprouted mung beans. As thrilling as the food itself were the bits and pieces of the useful information Ulli had to share about every single ingredient she used. For instance, how she swears by anchovies that contain the least mercury and packed with Omega 3, how antioxidant-loaded goji berries are used in the anti-aging treatments of the traditional Chinese medicine and how sprouting beans boosts their nutrition and makes them easier to digest.
As I googled sprouting mung beans next day I realized I arrived late to the party: I am possibly the only person in the world who have never sprouted these beans! Sprouted mung beans appeared to be a popular ingredient in Chinese cooking, and since that I am also the only person in the world who knows next to nothing about Chinese food, that explains a lot of things.
Mung beans, or maş in Turkish, are small green roundish beans that you can easily find at a good store in Istanbul where they sell beans, legumes and grains. It might be not the most common ingredient here in Turkey while some use it for soup or salad that we call piyaz that features a cooked bean of choice garnished with diced onion and parsley and seasoned with a simple vinaigrette.
Sprouting any bean or whole grain is practically cooking it hands off (meaning even the busiest of us can sprout beans) and without any heat (meaning that most of the nutrients stay in instead of being chased away by - often long - cooking process required to make a bean or grain soft and digestible). You just soak them overnight and wrap in a clean damp cloth. Two days later the beans sprout like insane. As Ulli explained, during the sprouting a substance that creates gas vanishes that’s why the beans become hundred times more digestible.
So genius and so simple! I wondered why-why-why I have never sprouted the abundant beans and whole grains in Turkey. Is that not ridiculous how often we find ourselves in a small tiny box we have constructed of our own thoughts and intentions? However big you aim now and then you are ending up in that very box!
I am often thinking about this box in relation to my blog. Because I blog about the food we eat and cook in Istanbul and generally in Turkey and because I teach Turkish cooking I feel the imperative of cooking and eating Turkish food most of the time. On the one hand, once you immerse yourself fully in a certain domain, you can seriously advance your expertise. I love this quote from Niels Bohr, a Nobel prize winning Danish physicist: “‘An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field’. “How do you know?”, someone would ask me. “Well, just because I’ve cooked or eaten it hundreds of times!”
On the other hand, now and then I find myself in a self-inflicted imprisonment in a tiny box. What about the huge world of the other exciting cuisines but Turkish? Not only I’ve not been looking to learn about the new ones, but also I am completely ignoring the flavors and cooking methods I had grown to appreciate during my years in Scandinavia, India, Ukraine or even my home Russia. That’s why being around Ulli’s kitchen, eating her food and poking in her kitchen pantry felt so refreshing!
The next day I bought mung beans and sprouted them. 3 days later I composed the salad of the greens, pomegranate seeds, roasted walnuts and the sprouted beans. It was so warming, bright and fresh that I was repeating the feat 3 days in a row. Even though I can’t give you such a grounded explanation as Ulli readily provides, I feel - no, with my naturally-built-in radar for nutritious food, I just know - that in winter we are supposed to eat salads like that!
How to Sprout Mung Beans
Best to kick off the sprouting first thing in the morning or late evening, as the beans require a few moments of your attention every 12 hours for 2-3 days.
Day 1/Morning: Wash the amount of the beans you want to sprout until the water is clean. Soak the mung beans in 3 times volume of water (e.g. 3 cups water for 1 cups beans). Stir and skim off beans that will rise to the surface: they are too dry to sprout. Leave overnight (8-10 hours).
Day 1/Evening: Discard the water and rinse the beans: they have increased 2-3 times in size and some have gotten cracked skin revealing the white bean; now the mung beans are ready to sprout. Place a large sieve/colander over a fitting mixing bowl and line it up with a clean cheese cloth or kitchen towel. Transfer the pre-soaked and rinsed beans on the cloth / towel and use the same cloth to cover the beans.
Day 2/Morning: Rinse the beans again in 12 hours and return to the sieve lined with the cloth: you will see a few tiny sprouts on some beans.
Day 2/Evening: After 12 hours rinse the beans again.
Day 3/Morning: Rinse the beans. If you are happy with the size of the sprouts, thoroughly drain the beans and use at once or place in a container and keep in the fridge for 2-4 days. If you want more robust beans, return them to the sieve and continue sprouting like before until you are happy with the outcome.
Raw Sprouted Mung Bean Salad with Ginger-Orange Vinaigrette
Serves 4
Ingredients
1/2 cup dry mung beans, sprouted as described above
1 large pomegranate, seeds of
1/4 cup walnuts, pan-toasted
6 medium French breakfast radishes, cut into paper-thin slices
6 spring onions shots, finely chopped
4 thin celery stalks including the leafy tops, finely chopped
Ginger-Orange Vinaigrette
1/2 orange
3 cm (1.2 inch)-long piece of ginger root, unpeeled
1/4 cup extra virgin olive oil
freshly ground black pepper
fine sea salt
Directions
Coarsely grate the ginger and with your hands squeeze it into a small mixing bowl to extract as much juice as possible. Squeeze the juice of 1/2 orange in the same bowl and pour in the extra virgin olive oil. Add pepper and salt. Whisk lightly until the vinaigrette turns opaque.
Combine all the salad ingredients in a medium mixing bowl, pour over the vinaigrette, cover with a plate or a lead and shake well so that the dressing thoroughly coats all the ingredients. Serve immediately.
salads are always my favourites. and this one is realy inspiring. I will try.
And so glad to see Ulli again..