Sprouting is the slowest part of what we do. Grain is cleaned, soaked, drained, then left to germinate under watch — warm enough to wake up, not so warm that anything else wakes up with it. Then dried and pulverised. It adds days to a batch and cost to a pack.
We are often asked whether it is worth it. Here is the honest answer.
What a seed is doing when it sprouts
A dry grain is a seed holding its breath. It is built for storage, which means built to keep its nutrients locked up. Add water and warmth and it switches to growth, producing enzymes to break down its own reserves. We interrupt that early, while it works in our favour.
The phytate question
Whole grains and pulses contain phytic acid, which binds minerals such as iron, zinc and calcium and reduces how much the body can absorb. It is the main reason a food can look good on a nutrition table and deliver rather less.
Germination activates phytase, an enzyme that breaks phytate down. A 2022 review in Nutrition Bulletin found this to be a real, repeatable effect that improves the bioaccessibility of those minerals.
The same review is careful about something we want to be careful about too: how much phytate is reduced varies a great deal — by grain, variety, soaking time, temperature and the grain's own phytase activity. So we will tell you we sprout because it improves how well minerals can be absorbed. We will not give you a percentage, because an honest one needs a paragraph of conditions and a dishonest one is easy to print.
What else changes
- It gets easier to digest. Germination begins breaking starches and proteins into simpler forms — which is why sprouted preparations have traditionally been given to children, to people recovering from illness, and to the very old.
- It tastes different. A faint sweetness develops and the raw edge comes off. The difference between raw flour and something that smells like food.
What sprouting does not do
It does not turn a grain into a medicine. It does not treat or prevent any condition. It does not make a sweet food into something you can eat without thinking about the sweetener — our laddus are sweetened with jaggery, and sprouting the grain inside them does not change that.
Why in-house
Sprouting is easy to do badly. Warm, damp grain is hospitable to more than the seedling, so the process must be controlled and the drying prompt. We run it at our own facility in Dindigul, under our food technologist, in small batches — because the two days in the middle are the part you cannot inspect after the fact.
You can taste the result in the sprouted multigrain mix or the sprouted pesarattu mix, both made this way.
Source: Elliott et al., Nutrition Bulletin, 2022.
