How to Soak and Sprout Lentils for GAPS Cooking

Whole lentils need a little planning before they go into a GAPS soup. This preparation starts with a twelve-hour soak, followed by rinsing and draining until short sprouts appear. You then cook the lentils thoroughly in the meal you are making. The jar is advance preparation, not a bowl of raw sprouts to eat.

Start with one and a half cups of dry whole green lentils. Keep that starting measure attached to the batch as the seeds swell and sprout. For golden lentil soup with turmeric and coconut, use this entire prepared batch. Do not measure one and a half cups again after sprouting.

Our older kids can cook and follow recipes, and clear directions help when kitchen jobs are shared. A label saying what is in the jar and when it needs rinsing is more useful than expecting everyone to remember the plan. That matters in our house with homeschooling before second shift. A longer preparation can fit around the day when its small jobs are clear.

Choose Whole Lentils

Use dry, whole green lentils suitable for sprouting. The seed needs to remain intact. Split lentils have been divided, and they cannot follow this same sprouting method. A bag of split red or yellow lentils is not interchangeable with the whole lentils in this jar.

Sort through the dry lentils before measuring them. Remove stones, debris and damaged pieces, then measure one and a half cups for this batch. Rinse them with fresh filtered water. They should look like small, firm, intact seeds rather than a mixture of broken halves.

Do not begin with canned or already cooked lentils. This preparation starts with living dry seeds that can produce a shoot. Cooking comes after the soak and sprouting, in the recipe that uses them.

Green lentils also make the appearance easier to understand. The outside of the seed remains greenish-brown as it swells. A little pale shoot emerges from the seed. The lentil does not need to become a long leafy plant before it is ready for cooking.

What You Need

The ingredients are one and a half cups of dry whole green lentils and filtered water for soaking and rinsing. The water is used generously and drained away. There is no measured water ingredient to carry into the finished soup.

Use a roomy wide-mouth glass jar, or divide the lentils between jars. Keep the dry layer shallow, around two inches, and leave space for the seeds to swell. A jar filled almost to the top with dry lentils will not have room for this preparation.

Cover the opening with mesh or cheesecloth held by a jar ring or securing band. You also need a bowl that can hold the jar securely at a diagonal. Water should be able to drain through the covered opening without the jar tipping over or sitting in its own puddle.

A measuring cup and a simple date label finish the setup. No blender, food processor, heating appliance or fermentation starter is needed for sprouting these lentils.

How to Soak and Sprout Lentils

Give the Seeds a Twelve-Hour Soak

Put the measured lentils into the jar and add a generous amount of filtered water. Leave plenty of water above the seeds because they will absorb it and expand. Secure the mesh or cheesecloth over the opening.

Soak for at least twelve hours. The lentils should become visibly fuller than the dry seeds you started with. This soak rehydrates them; it is not the completed sprouting step.

After soaking, drain off the water. Add fresh water, rinse the lentils well, then drain again. Keep the entire swollen batch. The increased volume does not mean you should throw some away to return to the dry starting measure.

Let the Jar Drain

Invert the covered jar and rest it at a diagonal in the bowl. Its opening needs room to drain, while the bowl supports the jar’s weight. Check that water is leaving the lentils instead of collecting around them.

The seeds should stay damp between rinses, but they should not remain submerged. Move drained water out of the bowl as needed so the jar is not resting in it. Keep the mesh secure while you handle the jar.

Monica Corrado’s sprouting method uses this angled jar arrangement to encourage drainage. The draining position is part of the preparation, not just a way to store the jar between kitchen jobs.

Rinse Two or Three Times Each Day

Add fresh filtered water, move it gently through the lentils, and pour it off through the secured covering. Return the jar to its draining position. Repeat two or three times each day.

Spread those rinses through the day rather than doing them all together. A morning, later-day and evening check can be easier to remember than an unnamed instruction to rinse regularly. Choose a schedule you can actually maintain.

Check the whole batch as you rinse. The seeds should have room to move rather than forming a tightly packed plug at the jar opening. If you need more room, divide the batch between clean jars and keep rinsing and draining both.

Look for Short, Visible Shoots

Lentils generally take one to two days to sprout after soaking. Look for a shoot about a quarter inch long or longer. The shoot is a small pale growth emerging from the seed, not a split piece of lentil or a loose fiber from the covering.

Use the food state as well as the clock. A damp jar that has sat for a day without producing shoots is not automatically a sprouted batch. Give viable whole lentils the rinsing and drainage they need and check again.

Once the shoots reach the preparation’s endpoint, rinse once more and drain thoroughly. They are now ready for their cooking recipe. Keep the shoots attached rather than trying to remove them.

Cooking the Prepared Lentils

Sprouting does not replace cooking for this GAPS preparation. Add the drained lentils to the recipe that calls for them and cook until they are completely soft. A finished lentil should not have a firm, chalky center when you press or taste a cooked one.

Measure the dry lentils before soaking, then use all of the expanded amount when the recipe is based on that dry measure. If a different recipe calls for cooked lentils measured by the cup, cook and drain them first, then measure the cooked amount. Those are different measuring points.

The soaking water and rinse water are discarded. They do not count toward the stock or water measured for a soup. Start the cooking recipe with its own stated liquid amount.

For homemade-stock meals, keep the chicken meat stock ready separately. It supplies the cooking liquid and flavor when a soup calls for it; the sprouting jar supplies only the drained lentils.

Where Lentils Fit on GAPS

Dr. Natasha’s 2020 GAPS book requires dried legumes to be soaked, rinsed, fermented or sprouted, and cooked well. Lentils belong later on Full GAPS, after diarrhea and other digestive symptoms have cleared completely. Completing the jar preparation does not give them an early Intro placement.

This recipe chooses sprouting after the soak. It is not a fermentation recipe, and it does not use kefir, yogurt or whey as a starter. That keeps the lentil preparation free of dairy ingredients.

The GAPS beans and legumes guide explains the permitted varieties and the separate double-fermentation preparation. Follow the complete method that belongs to your actual ingredient rather than treating every bean as the same food.

Planning and Keeping the Batch

Allow the twelve-hour soak plus roughly one to two days of sprouting before cooking. Those waiting periods are separate from your soup’s simmer. The active jobs are measuring, rinsing and setting the jar back to drain.

Write the starting dry measure and soak date on the jar. If you divide one batch between two jars, label both as parts of the same batch. That makes it easier to use all the lentils together without guessing later.

Plan to cook the drained sprouts when they are ready. If cooking needs to wait briefly, transfer them to a clean covered container and refrigerate. Keep the subsequent cooking step in the plan rather than treating the chilled sprouts as a finished snack.

For a doubled batch, start with three cups of dry lentils and use more roomy jars. Each jar still needs its own rinsing and good drainage. More lentils do not need a longer shoot before cooking.

My upcoming Weekly Kitchen Rhythm Planner helps you put preparations like these ahead of the meals that need them. Find it through the WFLI shop as the collection becomes available.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can I Use Split Yellow or Red Lentils?

Use whole green lentils for this sprouting preparation. Split lentils cannot produce the same intact-seed shoot and need a different preparation. Do not use this jar schedule as proof that a split batch has sprouted.

Do I Measure Again After Sprouting?

Not when the cooking recipe calls for the prepared batch from one and a half cups of dry lentils. Use the entire expanded batch. A recipe calling for a cooked cup measure is measured after cooking instead.

Do I Need an Acidifier?

This sprouting method uses filtered water. It is different from an acidulated soaking method and from a cultured fermentation. Follow its rinse-and-drain steps without adding an unmeasured starter.

Can the Sprouted Lentils Be Eaten Raw?

This GAPS preparation is for cooking. Rinse and drain the sprouted lentils, then cook them completely in the recipe that uses them.