Sprouting Magic

Dulse. Medjool dates.  Maca.  Hemp.  If these are words that make you hungry, congratulations, you are a successful hippie.  Now don’t get me wrong, I’m right in there with you…well, maybe not on the hungry part, but….these are all ingredients in a natural, home-made, recovery drink that I’m trying.  As a gluten and dairy free person, many of the off the shelf recovery drinks are hard to take.  I find, as I explore my nutrition as part of my training, that I lean more and more to the vegan athletes (i.e. the ones that don’t drink milk or use whey protein).  This particular recipe comes from Matt Frazier, the No Meat Athlete…well technically from Brendan Brazier’s Thrive, but reprinted with commentary from Matt.

So when I say I’m trying this recipe, I haven’t actually consumed any.  The reason being, you can’t buy sprouted buckwheat.  Who knew?  So before I can gratefully consume a post workout recovery drink, I have to sprout me some buckwheat.  Now before you go questioning my choice of recipe, buckwheat is not in fact wheat.  Fun fact.  It is a seed.  And a very good one at that.  I’m relatively familiar with sprouting grain from my pre-GF brewing days.  Sprouting barley is a key part of making malt.  I am quite intrigued with this process, though, because I’ve long thought that a decent GF brew could be made with a combination of other malts and this a kickstart in that direction.  But I digress.

So what is sprouting?  For those of you not on the hippie journey, sprouting is a process where you encourage the seed to start what nature made it for: to start growing into a plant.  The only difference is we humans are mean, we don’t let it actually grow into a plant, we eat it only a couple of days into this process.  If you’re wondering why one might go to the trouble, the answer is the same for both beer and smoothies: sprouting is the natural process where the seed takes all of its inaccessible nutrition and makes it available to those who would consume it.  Much like the yeast in beer, I’m trying to get at the sugars and nutrients locked away in the raw groat.  Fun fact, groat is the word for hulled seed.  Again, who knew.

When all this sprouting and blending comes to fruition, I will of course update you on the result.  This will likely be the most expensive recovery drink known to man given what some of these ingredients cost, but if it works, I’m willing to give it a go.  No one who’s ever gone down the Ironman road would ever claim that it was cheap.  Keep sprouting!