By Elizabeth Herman| Posted: May 23, 2019
The tangy, slightly hot taste of lemon, ginger, green chili and mustard seeds makes these mung bean bars delicious. The fresh and rich, creamy protein in the ground, sprouted mung beans, briefly fried in oil, helps to balance out the hot and sour flavorings. If you have an interest in ayurvedic healing through diet and nutrition, this recipe should fit right in and complement your program.
During a Silence Retreat in St. Louis, Missouri, I helped out in the kitchen and learned this flexible and fantastic recipe for easy-to-digest sprouted mung bean bars with ginger, green chile, mustard seeds and lemon. I absolutely love them and can’t eat them enough. Nowadays, I usually prepare a tray of these bars about once a week or so.
The amounts are inexact so the directions are rather flexible, but it’s important to soak the mung beans for at least two days to make sure they sprout nicely before you grind them up with the ginger and green chile. The proportion of spices to mung beans is adjustable, but you want about 1 inch of ginger and 1 green chili for each cup of mung beans.
Directions:
- Soak 1 or 2 cups of mung beans for 2 days in water so they sprout, then dice the ginger and chilies alone in the food processor before adding the beans, until they’re small. Coarse grind the beans together with the ginger and chilies with as little water as possible in a food processor and salt to taste.
- In a large pot (non-stick would be good) add a generous amount of oil. When it is hot add some mustard seeds.
- Wait until the splutter, and then add some hing (asafoetida) powder and a few dried red chilies if you have them.
- Then put in the mung bean mix. Keep stirring until it forms a lump. This gets to be hard at times but keep chugging along.
- Pour onto a greased plate or cookie sheet. Let sit until cool, then cut into bars.
- Sprinkle some lemon juice and zest over the top before serving.
- On the second day, or when they are a few days old, you could shallow fry them again until crisp.
I hope you will enjoy these wonderful bars as much as I have! They’ll help your digestion and your mood and meditation as well.
By Elizabeth Herman - PhD in English, with concentrations in Rhetoric and Composition, and Literature, she offers writing support to clients, teaches locally, lives in Boone, NC, and volunteers for a better world.
