Sprouted Kidney Bean Tempeh

Sprouted kidney bean tempeh

As most in this community know kidney beans are one of the beans that come with a “must be cooked” warning for anyone thinking of sprouting them.

Now that we have that part out of the way I wanted to start a discussion and inquiry about what makes specifically the kidney beans so special. I feel like I must have stumbled upon either an error, or an insanely good vegetable based protein source for a very low whole food calorie per gram of protein ratio.

In doing my research sprouting did show to improve the calorie per gram of protein ratio in foods. Some more than others.

But what I can’t figure it is what makes the kidney bean so special in this regard.

Here were my findings using USDA database as my source and a 100 gram food serving as my base measurement. I took the total calories in the serving of foods and divided it by the grams of protein in the serving to get the calories per gram of protein ratio. If high protein is what you seek then the lower this number is the better. Each gram of protein is 4 calories meaning the absolute perfect ratio for any given food is 4 calories per gram of protein and that food would be 100% protein.

Lentils saw an 8.6% protein content improvement. Soybeans saw a 1.4% improvement but it should be noted their ratio was already significantly better. But kidney beans shined here with a 52.8% improvement!

It’s been bothering me not knowing if this is just an error in their database or a literal protein power house. At 6.87 calories per gram of protein for a boiled sprouted kidney bean, if accurate, that would mean this food is a whopping 58% protein.

I know that fermenting beans in the process of making tempeh improves the nutritional makeup of the food in other aspects outside of protein content (see the comparison of tempeh to non sprouted soybeans in the table which is virtual unchanged).

But if the sprouted kidney bean datapoint is accurate I am wanting to sprout some kidney beans, pressure cook them to remove toxins, cool the sprouts and inoculate with tempeh starter and make some sprouted kidney bean tempeh.

Does anyone have any input on this?

I’m kind of obsessing over this so I felt the need to get it out there.

Thanks for reading!

by improvingiskey