By the term "terminating lentils in water"
I mean a similar thing to sprouting thing such as alfalfa in water. The crux difference is that lentils do not really sprout, they germinate because their core is removed.
Wikipedia here states that:
Dried lentils can also be sprouted by leaving in water for several days. This changes their nutrition profile.
so what does it mean? I am always looking for getting most out of bucks but sprouted beans taste good so trying with lentils. I like lentils due to their high protein content. I am unsure what happens to lentils in sprouting. Does sprouting just break some starch to smaller carbon chains if so what does it mean in terms of protein content? Some energy is surely lost in sprouting as the bad water is thrown away. But how do the nutritional values change?
[Update]
The word sprouting is misleading in discussing lentils. The core of lentils is removed so the process is substantially different to sprouting things such as alfalfa where they totally transform the form. The transformation of lentils is because the seeds react to water like after winter, bacteria breaks the long compressed chains of protein to more accessible forms such as amino acids which people would anyway break, saving energy for people in the breakdown process (similar thing in meat heating where long protein chains get shorter). The generated smelling stuff is bacterial junk due to the process. According to my friends, experts in the field, many questions considering taste, fermentation, sprouting and the protein breakdown are unsolved.
I cannot unfortunately access some current research papers on the issue, here, but there is a promising paper "Nutritional assessment of raw, heated, and germinated lentils"
by G Urbano (1995). The technical jargon for this problem is apparently germinated lentils
. I don't use the term sprouting to stress the uniqueness of the process, not having the core. So how is the nutritional profile different between raw lentils and germinated lentils in water?