The Sprout Garden: The Indoor Grower's Guide to Gourmet Sprouts [Paperback]

Mark Matthew Braunstein (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 1993

From seed selection to meal preparation (including 50 recipes) this book is a definitive, lighthearted guide to growing and enjoying over 40 different varieties of sprouts.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"The definitive book on sprouting .... Sprout Garden gives us an intimate and detailed look into all aspects of sprouting."
--Vegetarian Voice

"This lighthearted yet thorough handbook ... provides all you need for a lively new way to sprout."  --Vegetarian Gourmet --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

About the Author

Mark M. Braunstein is one of the leading authorities on sprouting. He has been a guest speaker at whole life expos, vegetarian festivals, animal rights conferences and college campuses. Mark is also the author of Radical Vegetarianism A Dialectic of Diet and Ethic. --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

Product Details

• Paperback: 96 pages
• Publisher: Book Pub Co (July 1993)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0913990965
• ISBN-13: 978-0913990964
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 5.8 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,494,916 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #80 in Books > 4-for-3 Books > Cooking, Food & Wine > Vegetables & Vegetarian > General

More About the Author

Born too soon, I probably will die too late. Until that inevitable end, believing neither in afterlife nor aftershave, I aspire to spend the rest of my life as a very hairy and very healthy corpse. That should suffice as my life's story, a short story.

Want to know more? If so, now there's no stopping me. Am a Leo, and I can't help it, I was born that way. Am a college fine arts academic now bored by the arts, a nature photographer who seeks to shoot the sunrise at risk of being blinded, and an instructor of Photoshop which helps me make my nature photos look more like nature and less like photos. My handheld-camera self-portrait was photo'd August 2007 and was not photoshopped to make me look thinner or younger or just plain better. You be the judge whether I present the picture of health. If you think I look 10 years younger than my age, then try to imagine that even at the age of 9 I looked 10 years younger than my age. During my search for eternal youth, I have written books and articles with the intent to save the world, though I'm now content to save my breathe. Was a Cub Sprout who grew up into a Boy Sprout and wilderness backpacker, backwoods mountain biker, near-marathon runner, and more-than-mile swimmer. But now that I am a Man Sprout, I am permanently crippled by a sports injury, and probably pickled by nearby nuke plant radioactivity, to which might be attributed others' misshapen bodies and my misconceived thoughts. Family, friends and lovers shape our thoughts and our lives. Mine also are influenced by my animal neighbors in a nature preserve where I live, and by the books which I read. I've studied both Testaments of the Bible, and the tenets of Buddhism and Shinto. Add to my reader's dossier the nearly entire oeuvres of way too many Eurocentric dead white males, for instance Melville and Whitman, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, Rilke and Leopardi, Kafka and Borges, Cioran and Beckett, Plato and Socrates, Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, and my guru and mentor and doctor Seuss, to name some whose rhymes and rants I somehow survived without going crazy, but also without growing wise. I've also read more than a lioness's share of women writers too, just not anyone who has changed my life, say the way Socrates and Plato did, who taught me for instance that poverty is measured not by how little one owns, but by how much one wants. So while I want to foster happiness in our individual lives, I want more to inspire reverence for the planet upon which our meager lives depend. Consequently my own greatest inspirations are the writings of Peter Matthiessen, Farley Mowat, and Edward Abbey, especially Abbey's Fool's Progress and Desert Solitaire, both which I've cried over and read twice over, the second times chapter-by-chapter backwards, after all according to Kierkegaard, Life is Lived Forwards but Understood Backwards. In deference to and defense of Mother Earth, I've never wanted to father a child, nor have I ever fathered an unwanted child. And though I like cats and dogs, I can't bring myself to bring home dead animals from the slaughterhouse to feed to live ones in the doghouse. Calves and lambs and kids and piglets are cuddly animals too, which is why since age 15 I have not eaten them, nor since age 19 drank the milk their mothers intended for them. I wonder what people mean when they espouse their love for animals, yet they love them also for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Also I do not eat white flour or white sugar or take pharmaceutical drugs or drink alcohol or smoke tobacco, but I do unabashedly smoke medical marijuana, medicinally for below the waist, and recreationally for above. I am merely human, so certainly not a god. I believe in all of the gods, but none of the religions, especially not Western religions, whose pages of history are stained with the blood of infidels and animals. Born a Judeo-Buddhist atheist, I now am an eco-pagan pantheist. I am not religious, but if I were religious, I would be a Carthusian or Zen monk, except for my being incurably and heretically heterosexual, and except for my being more zany than holy. Am a former island resident of the nuthouse called Manhattan, where same as most of its residents I too was a nutcase, until I outgrew my ego-driven ambition to earn a livelihood as a painter, for which my only regret is not having renounced art sooner. As primary collector of my own art and primary caretaker of my own health, I reside as an ape man in a nature preserve where the chickadees perch upon me, and where, because I do not smell like a predator, the deer do not flee me. And where I live without a tranquilizing tv, metastasizing microwave, alarming alarmclock, or handcuffing wristwatch. I've never shopped at Wal-Mart nor on eBay, but have browsed the stalls of the Grand Bazaar in Istanbul. I've never set foot in nearby Foxwoods, but have hiked the faraway Grand Canyon from rim to river to rim. I've never drank Classic Coke or Coors or Starbucks, but have fasted just on water many times and many days. I'll never attain enlightenment nor see god, but perhaps I'll see into the future and see you reading this amazon webpage, or my own, that's: www.markbraunstein.org ("org" for organic, or whatever else may come to your mind)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

74 of 76 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Sproutguy's revised review of the Revised Edition, August 1, 2000

By 

Gil Frishman (Viroqua, WI USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Sprout Garden - Revised Edition (Paperback)

Mark did a great job of updating this book! It is packed with a whole lot more info (not that the 1st edition wasn't packed as well) and is layed out beautifully. All I said in my review of the 1st edition still goes, but I now kinda enjoy the puns and the additional info makes this book even more indispensable. This is the BEST BOOK ON SPROUTING that currently exists! When all is said and done this is what remains: We (The Sproutpeople) have grown over 180 tons of sprouts (by hand) - from over 70 types of seed - since 1993, and when we have a question that we don't know the answer to, we pick up THIS BOOK!

75 of 81 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A relatively comprehensive though dogmatic reference., June 10, 1998

By 

Gil Frishman (Viroqua, WI USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Sprout Garden: The Indoor Grower's Guide to Gourmet Sprouts (Paperback)

As a professional sprouter I have plenty of experience - and - have read every book under the sun on sprouts. Mark's book is full of terrible puns but when it comes to information on a wide variety of seeds is better than any other I have seen. It still suffers from the same problem as all the others - it states THE WAY to sprout. I have found that there are many ways to sprout and very few hard and fast rules. The result is that newbies follow the written advice and refrain from experimenting - thus limiting their sprouting experience and, I fear - the joy of that experience. It seems to me that everyone who writes books on sprouting must have read a book before they ever sprouted and that they eventually pass on the same misinformation they originally took as fact. I on the other hand didn't read a book until I'd sprouted for a year or more, and when I did I read that things that worked well for me couldn't possibly work at all. So, take what you read with a grain of salt and know this: seeds want to germinate (sprout). If you expose them to moisture they will do it, so sprouting is nothing more than making the the conditions good. Experiment freely. Happy Sprouting :-)

39 of 40 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A very complete, helpful guide, May 29, 2004

By A Customer

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Sprout Garden - Revised Edition (Paperback)

I have read several sections of books on sprouting, and have sprouted off and on, for 20+ years, but this is the best, most detailed, and therefore most helpful of everything I've found. I think teaching someone to sprout from a book is a little like learning to tie your shoes by book: it is easy once you've done it a while, but very difficult if you are a rank beginner. This book is written completely enough for the true beginner, but with LOTS of information for those wanting to "take their sprouting to the next level" by trying scores of different seeds. I finally learned WHY I didn't have success with some types of seeds, and WHAT TO DO ABOUT IT! The only disappointment is that the nutritional information seems mere assertions, with no charts of which sprouts yield what amounts of which nutrients; still, the book is very worth owning. And, by the way, sunflower sprouts are divine on a salad!