Customer Reviews

Sproutman's Kitchen Garden Cookbook: 250 flourless, Dairyless, Low Temperature, Low Fat, Low Salt, Living Food Vegetarian Recipes

5 star:		(20)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

"Sproutman's Kitchen Garden Cookbook" is a great all-purpose book for anyone new to sprouts and sprouting and for the sprout vetran who is looking for more recipes and ideas. The tone is chatty and humourous. The book is a great read cover to cover, but it can also be read a section at a time, in any order.
I received this book as a gift and almost immediately I had trays and bags of sprouts in my kitchen. We've stopped putting lettuce on sandwiches and use various sprouts. Sprouts on salad, in stir-fry, in soup... I've tried several of the recipes with success. The sprout bread is really popular and so are the crunchy sprouts.
One word of caution: sprout bread has neither the flavour nor the texture of bakery bread. It is better. It is sweeter and more satisfying. It is also packed with nutrition. If you are expecting something close to regular bread, you will be disappointed. If you remember that what you are eating is something else entirely, you will love it.

I'm into raw foodism and have found various recipe books for a raw foodist. This book is the best recipe book I know. It's very detailed, practical, and rich in contents. I also like the philosophy of the author: While it is good to increase the intake of raw foods, it's not necessary that every mouthful of food contains enzyme. Sometimes it's necessary to cook the food at a relatively low temperature. I've learned to make sprouted wheat bread from this book. It's very easy and the bread is wonderfully nutritious and delicious.

I recommend this book highly to every one, raw foodist or not.

If you are interested in the health benefits of eating healthy bread without the allergens and toxins of flour and have become a fan of the "Ezekiel Bread" you will love this cookbook. It is easy, and fun to grow your own sprouts, and see fresh bread in 3 days! Variations are endless and I think Steve has done a wonderful job showing how simple the process is, and it is not intimidating in beginning your road to better health. Thanks to the Sproutman for this wealth of information - be sure to share some of your bread with friends (they won't believe it's sprouted grain!).

Finally, a recipe book that has wonderful live food recipes that are practical and simple enough to where kids can help. The ingredients are easy to obtain and with a little kitchen equipment (dehydrator and food processor), I can finally make my family something simple and delicious. This is the only book I have where I can actually use 100% of the recipes, not just a few. Not only is this book one of the best raw food "non cook" books out there, it is full of nutrition information and humor. It will keep you smiling!

I guess I'm not the typical reviewer here - I am interested in healthy eating, but without the context of a major life change for myself and my family of five... I'd like to find new ways to eat well, without undermining our entire familiar (mostly vegetarian, mostly well-balanced) diet.

Let's start with what this book IS: an excellent guide to using all types of sprouts, and to which types are good for which occasions - baking, stir-frying, salads, etc. It's also a rather overt advertisement for "Sproutman's" own website and sprouting tools (sprout bag, greenhouse, seeds, etc); fair enough.

The book is full of interesting, simple recipes and ideas for using sprouts either raw or with low temp cooking to get the most nutrition out of every green, crunchy bite. He's also thrown in a bunch of related nutrition stuff - non-sprout items like vegan ice creams and helpful alternatives to salt and other seasonings.

Still, I found that most of the recipes were impractical for family cooking. If two cups of sprouted wheat make a single small loaf or several crackers or cookies, it doesn't take long to realize I'm going to need wheat berries bursting out of every corner of my tiny kitchen in order to create one meal for the five of us.

And that's just bread! To create enough sprouts for us to eat a single salad, a single stir-fry, a single helping of sprouted nuts... well, we're probably going to need to renovate other areas of the house to accomodate all the grow-bags or baskets.

Also, many of the recipes are just variants on previous recipes. Like, he'll take a page to describe how to make a cracker, and then ANOTHER page - this is just an example from memory - on how to make seasoned crackers, and it's obvious the ingredients and steps are identical, just with seasonings added.

Finally, having tasted sprouts and fermented products, I have some idea of what kinds of flavours to expect. Suggesting that his fermented "rejuvalac" beverage will taste similar to lemonade sounds way overblown. He actually hints that it may taste more "like sauerkraut" - to me, that's a BIG difference. Sorry, but I don't curl up on a summer's day with a tall, cool glass of sauerkraut.

Similarly, I realize our dependence on added sugars is overblown, but if I call something a "cookie", my kids (10 & 11) are going to know I'm lying if it's only sweetened with natural sprout maltose and a few raisins. Yes, sprouts give a nice malty sweetness to bread - but only the most idealistic parents would believe kids would accept it as a special-occasion treat.

I guess I was looking for a book that would help me incorporate sprouts into every aspect of our regular household dishes - stir fries, yes, but also to add flavour/nutrition to standard yeast breads, cakes, cookies, veg patties, etc.

Being almost totally vegan (he practically apologizes in the one section where he asks you to put a bit of butter into your rice cereal), there is too little range of dishes for our family's tastes and the dishes offered seem too monotonous for long-term enjoyment.

This book may be ideal for a single person or a couple who want to try an "extreme" veg or raw-foods or minimal-cooking lifestyle. For our family lifestyle, the overhaul required is too enormous to even begin imagining - and trust me, I have plenty of imagination!

WOW! I never knew you could do so much with sprouts! I bought this book thinking of all the great salads I was going to make. After reading through this cookbook, I now am looking forward to sprout breads, cookies, bagels, and more. There are also lots of recpies that don't use sprouts, like seed cheese and yogurt, cashew vanilla malt (delicious!), and soups and dressings.
This book is well worth the low price.

The "Kitchen Garden" was an answer to a prayer. The wisdom contained in
there answered a lot of questions about my desire to return to Veganism and
preferably a raw food diet. The candid and reasonable approach really helped
me with my struggle. The volumes of wonderful recipes were exactly what I
was looking for and will help me tremendously in expanding my cooking or
rather food preparation skills.

I got this book because I wanted to make sprout bread. The book is very informative. But 95% of the sprout recipes are for wheat. That is great if you want to sprout wheat, but I don't. It does repeat the same info in many parts of the book. But I would say over all I still say it is a great book. I am on a special diet so a lot of what he has in his recipes I can't use. But I did learn a few things.

This book is so helpful that I bought an additional one for my daughter in college. We are about 90% raw and this book is really helpful with real recipes we can use.

Sproutman Publications is a specialty publisher with an impressive roster of health books to their credit. One of the best of these is the "Sproutman's Kitchen Garden Cookbook" by Steve Meyerowitz who began his interest in the relationship of foods to health in 1975 when he sought to deal with a lifetime condition of allergies and asthma. After the traditional medical establishment had failed him for some twenty years, he was able to restore his health through diet and fasting. he at 100% live foods for five years, practices 'fruitarianism -- a diet of fruit, nuts and sprouted seeds -- and fasted on raw juices for as long as 100 days. The resulting improvement to his personal health was amazing. In "Sproutman's Kitchen Garden Cookbook", Steve has amassed superb collection of recipes for sprout breads, cookies, soups, and salads, as well as 250 additional low-fat, dairy-free, vegetarian recipes. The recipes are presented after the reader benefits from an informational presentation on the pros-and-cons of dairy, dehydrating foods, nutrition charts, sprouting, food drying, low temperature cooking, how to be a healthy vegetarian, and so much more. From Cashew Cottage Cheese; Mighty Millet Bread; Sunflower Nut Milk; and Banana Chips; to Manhattan Sprout Chowder; Braised Tofu; Spinach Marinade; and Creamed Potato Mash, "Sproutman's Kitchen Garden Cookbook" will prove to be a popular and invaluable addition to the cookbook collection for anyone having to deal with the problems of food related allergies and illnesses, as well as the recipe collections for general vegetarians. Also very highly recommended for those concerned with food related health issues are the other titles from Sproutman Publications (available through their website at www.sproutman.com) including: "The Organic Food Guide"; "Power Juices, Super Drinks"; Juice Fasting & Detoxification"; Wheatgrass: Nature's Finest Medicine; "Water: The Ultimate Cure; and "Food Combing and Digestion".