How to Roast Sunflower Seeds — Being the Roberts

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We grow a few sunflowers every year just to enjoy and to feed the birds. This past week we have been enjoying a fun project, harvesting sunflower seeds! They came out pretty good if I do say so myself.

This is one of our gigantic sunflower heads. It is around four inches bigger then a basketball, but that's just an estimate. On the stem they reached over eight feet tall, and the stem was about two to three inches around. These were the best sunflowers we had ever grown.

Harvesting Sunflower Seeds

Once the sunflowers has started to die back and the petals were mostly gone, it was time to harvest the sunflower seeds. Picking them wasn’t the easiest task. Eventually we flipped them upside down on a cookie sheet and beat them. Then we just had to scoop up the seeds that came out. Which was easy, considering the heads were dry and the seeds were big and loose.

If your sunflower seeds aren’t dry enough, you can remove them from the stalk and hang them upside down for a few days.

Roasting Sunflower Seeds

Next, we washed them under cold running water. Then, we started the soaking process. You can skip the next step if you want unsalted sunflower seeds.

Mix 2 quarts (8 cups) of water with 1/4 - 1/2 cup salt

Option 1:

Mix the sunflower seeds and salt mixture and soak overnight. Then place in a pot and boil for 10 minutes

Option 2:

Place the seeds in a pot and simmer for 2 hours

Drain the sunflower seeds in a colander for 20 minutes. Then we put down a layer or two of paper towels for them to dry on for three to four hours.

After drying, we put them on trays with a single evenly spread layer of seeds. Bake for 30 minutes at 300 degrees until crisp.

And this is the almost finished project, (We still have a smaller half batch baking.) They taste really good, nutty and natural, and not to salty. We saved some seeds for next year, hopefully we will have this amazing luck with sunflowers again.