Sprouts Salad with CBD Dressing: Recipe and Dosing

This is a fresh salad of mixed sprouts, tomato, cucumber, avocado and red onion, topped with hemp hearts and dressed with a lemon and mustard vinaigrette that has a few drops of CBD oil stirred in. It takes about ten minutes and needs no cooking. The cannabis side comes from the hemp hearts and the CBD oil. The sprouts themselves are ordinary shop-bought ones, such as alfalfa or mung bean (more on why below).

Two things deserve more attention than the chopping: raw sprouts carry a known food-safety risk, and CBD oil comes in very different strengths.

Ingredients (serves 2)

For the salad

• Two good handfuls of mixed sprouts, such as alfalfa, mung bean or broccoli sprouts
• A handful of cherry tomatoes, halved
• Half a cucumber, sliced
• One ripe avocado, diced
• A small red onion, thinly sliced
• Fresh herbs, chopped: cilantro or parsley both work
• Hemp hearts (shelled hemp seeds), to sprinkle on top
• Salt and pepper

For the dressing

• 3 tablespoons olive oil
• 1 tablespoon lemon juice
• 1 teaspoon Dijon mustard
• 1 teaspoon honey or maple syrup, if you like it a little sweet
• CBD oil: a few drops, see the dosing section before you add it
• Salt and pepper

How to make it

1. Rinse the sprouts in cold water and let them drain well. Wet sprouts water down the dressing.
2. Put the sprouts, tomatoes, cucumber, avocado and red onion in a large bowl. Add the herbs and a pinch of salt and pepper.
3. In a small bowl or jar, whisk the olive oil, lemon juice, mustard and honey until the dressing turns slightly creamy. Season it to taste.
4. Add the CBD oil last and whisk again so it spreads through the whole dressing instead of sitting in one spoonful.
5. Pour the dressing over the salad and toss gently. Avocado breaks up if you stir too hard.
6. Scatter the hemp hearts over the top just before serving, so they stay crunchy.

Serve it straight away. Dressed sprouts go limp quickly, and leftovers are not much fun the next day. If you want to prepare ahead, keep the dressing in a closed jar in the fridge and mix it in at the table.

Hemp hearts are the seeds of the hemp plant with the hard shell removed. They are sold as an ordinary food and taste mild and a little nutty, a bit like sunflower seeds. If you have never tried them, this salad is an easy way in.

Raw sprouts: the food-safety part

Sprouts are a salad ingredient that food-safety agencies single out. The US Food and Drug Administration explains why: sprouts need warm, humid conditions to grow, and those same conditions are ideal for bacteria such as Salmonella, Listeria and E. coli. If just a few harmful bacteria are on the seed, they can grow to high levels during sprouting, even when you sprout at home under clean conditions (FDA, Selecting and Serving Produce Safely, content current as of March 5, 2024).

The FDA advises children, older adults, pregnant women and people with weakened immune systems to avoid raw or lightly cooked sprouts of any kind. If someone at your table falls into one of those groups, swap the sprouts for shredded lettuce or arugula. The rest of the recipe stays the same.

For everyone else: buy sprouts that look fresh and have been kept in the fridge, keep them cold at home, and skip any that smell musty or look slimy.

How much CBD oil to use

CBD oil is sold in many strengths, so "a few drops" can mean very different amounts of CBD. Look at the label first. It tells you the percentage, or the milligrams of CBD per bottle.

The UK Food Standards Agency gives a clear reference point. In precautionary advice updated in October 2023, it recommends that healthy adults limit their intake of CBD from food to 10 mg per day, which it puts at roughly 4 to 5 drops of 5% CBD oil (Food Standards Agency, Cannabidiol (CBD), published February 13, 2020, advice updated October 2023). That is a daily total, from all sources together. If you already take CBD during the day, the drops in this dressing count toward it.

For a salad for two with 5% oil, that comes down to about 2 drops per person, so 4 to 5 drops in the whole dressing at most. With a stronger oil, use fewer drops. If the oil is stronger than 5% and you cannot work it out from the label, leave it out of the dressing and taste the salad without it. It is good without.

The same FSA advice says CBD is not recommended, unless under medical direction, for:

• children under 18
• anyone taking medication
• people trying to conceive
• people who are pregnant or breastfeeding

Those are UK recommendations. Rules on selling CBD in food differ between countries, so buy oil that is sold legally where you live and check what your local food authority says.

We are not making health promises for this salad. It is a tasty plate of vegetables with a small amount of CBD in it, nothing more.

Why the sprouts are not cannabis sprouts

People sometimes ask whether they can sprout their own cannabis seeds and put them in a salad. We would not, for two reasons.

The first is the law. Germinating a cannabis seed is the first step of growing a cannabis plant, and the rules on growing differ a lot from one country to the next. In the UK, for example, section 6 of the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971 makes it an offense to cultivate any plant of the genus Cannabis unless regulations allow it (legislation.gov.uk, Misuse of Drugs Act 1971, section 6, checked October 2026). Laws change, so check the current rules where you live before you put any cannabis seed in water.

The second is practical. Everything in our range has been grown by us at least once, and the people behind AMS include growers with close to 40 years of experience. From that side of the table, a seed that has germinated well is the start of a plant, not a garnish. Grocery sprouts are grown for eating and easy to find.

Where growing at home is legal and you want a plant rather than a salad, these are the basic steps:

1. Soak the seeds in clean water at room temperature, or start them between damp paper towels, until a small white root appears.
2. Move each seed into a small pot, peat pellet or seedling cube with the root pointing down, just under the surface.
3. Keep them warm and humid. A clear propagation dome or plastic cover helps, as in the photo above.
4. Give them light as soon as the first leaves show, with the lamp far enough away that it does not heat the seedlings.
5. Keep the medium moist but not soaked.
6. Move them into bigger pots once they have a few sets of true leaves.

Our full guide to germinating seeds goes through each method in detail, and the post on cannabis cultivation covers what comes after.

If you are ready to start growing, you can browse our cannabis seeds. And if you are only here for the salad: enjoy it, and go easy on the drops.