Beans

The word Bean can refer to many things. Sometimes it is used in the broader sense of Legumes such as lentils and peas; other times it refers to just, well, Beans -- anything from dried Beans such as Navy, Great Northern, Black and Kidney to Beans eaten fresh, such as green beans and yellow beans.

Like many other people, you may wonder why bother cooking Beans from dried, when you can buy them already cooked in tins. Baked beans, for instance, are great in tins. Each of us grew up with a brand of tinned baked beans that, as far as our taste buds are concerned, is what baked beans should taste like.

There seems to be a psychological barrier when cooking dried Beans. We think that it is a lot of work and that the Beans take forever to cook, and neither is true.

Basically, you whack Beans and water together in a pot, and let simmer. You don't have to do any further work; the water does it for you. Most beans require only an hour and a half of simmering.

There are five main bonuses to cooking your Beans such as Kidney Beans or Black Beans from dried:

• You feel like you've really cooked something, even though you just plonked Beans and water on your stove, and did your email for an hour and a half;
• You know what is and isn't in your Beans. One thing that's in tinned pre-cooked Beans for sure is lots of sodium. Lots. Typically, 400 - 600 mg per half-cup! If you're going to use tinned Beans -- don't take this wrong, they are great in emergencies. Draining and rinsing them will help to rinse some of the salt away;
• You get the stock from cooking the Beans. See below;
• You save money. Lots. Particularly if you use a pressure cooker to reduce fuel costs.

Bean Stock

However you cook your Beans -- slow-cooker, pressure-cooker, or plain old pot of boiling water, Beans give off a fabulous stock. The 1976 cookbook Laurel's Kitchen, was one of the first to champion bean stock; other cooks seemed to start discovering it at the start of the 2000's.

When you drain the cooked Beans, place a colander into a large bowl or Dutch oven, and then dump the Beans into the colander so that you catch the stock. Then freeze the stock, preferably in deli-sized containers so that you can thaw small portions as you need them. Bean stock is a tasty addition to gravies, soups, stews and sauces, and don't forget the nutrient boost. Why on earth would you pour it down the drain, and then make a special trip out later to spend money on dried, salty stock cubes?

Don't try to save the juice from tinned Beans; it is full of salt. Pitch a bay leaf in, if you have one handy;

• Overnight soaking is generally said to cut down cooking time by a half or so. Some say the pre-soaking can leech some of the nutrition out of the beans, even if it does reduce flatulence. Others figure, if their families get bloated, gassy stomachs, they'll never want beans again, period, so if a miniscule amount of nutrition is lost, they can live with that. If you've presoaked beans but then something occurs that you can't proceed with cooking them right away, drain them, and pop them in a sealed container for a day or so in fridge, or freeze.
• Use lots of water. Whatever else you believe or don't believe about water and vegetables, it doesn't apply to Beans. Bring water to a boil, then reduce to a simmer, and cook until tender. Don't boil the Beans, it will cause the skins to split. Check occasionally to make sure the Beans are still covered with water, if not, add more from a boiling kettle;
• An old trick to tenderize Beans was adding baking soda to the water, but use this trick with caution; it can make Beans mooshy and destroy nutrients in the Beans. (Some older Baked Bean recipes use this trick, but then, those recipes have taken the softening factor into account and rely on it);
• Dashes of vinegar, lemon juice, beer or wine added after cooking heighten the taste of Beans, and of legumes in general. In doing so you are addressing the four taste areas of the tongue. See entry on Adjusting Taste.

Dried Beans have to be cooked until they are soft. Don't even think about applying the "al dente" thing to them.

The most common complaints around the cooking of dried beans -- besides the "gasiness" after eating them -- are to do with their degree of doneness. Just as some people seem jinxed when cooking rice, some seem jinxed when cooking up dried beans. The beans either end up too "crunchy" or too "mooshy." Mooshy is not a problem if you are aiming for mashed-up refried beans, but it's a problem if you are making Baked Beans, as everyone is going to compare the texture to the perfect texture of canned baked beans.

Many people say the best way to cook beans is through a long, slow cooking time, with no pre-soaking. This is at odds with today's skyrocketing energy costs, the price of which after hours and hours of cooking can practically make those beans seem like caviar.

Ideally, use dried beans within six months of buying them. Some say use them within one year of harvesting, but the girl at the bulk store will likely look at you as though you were from Mars if you ask if she just happens to know when they were harvested. But with any luck, your bulk store will have a quick turnover of stock, and the six month figure should easily be a safe margin to go by. If the dried beans are much older, you can have a devil of a time trying to soften them, even if you boil them for weeks on end: in this instance, the old trick of a few pinches of baking soda, which can ruin dried beans in other circumstances, might be the way to go here. You can cook up beans that you have been using for blind baking. But you'll have to soak them forever, boil them forever, and you'll end up with beans that have next-to-no nutritional value or taste.

Conventional wisdom has said that dried beans simmered with salt in the water won't soften well. But experiments done by Russ Parsons of the Los Angeles Times (results published in same newspaper on 29 January 2003) found no difference in texture of beans cooked in salted water versus those cooked in unsalted water for the same amount of time.

The food scientist Harold McGee, however, disagrees. He says that how dried beans soften is by water penetrating to their interior. Salt inhibits the osmosis by which this happens, so the softening time is slowed down. He says the other thing to consider is that, however, putting it in the simmering water at the start helps let the salt flavour penetrate deeper into the beans, while adding it late just leaves the salt flavour at or just under the bean's surface. He says that the way to avoid this conundrum is to simply salt the water that you soak the beans in overnight -- in effect, brining the beans. Use about 3 tablespoons of table salt per pound (450g) of dried beans. Next morning, drain the beans, and rinse to get all the surface salt off. Then simmer as usual for the type of dried bean you are cooking. Note: you may wish to reduce the amount of salt in any sauce recipe you subsequently apply to the beans. Of course, if you have been advised to avoid salt for health reasons, that is another matter altogether, at any stage of the bean cooking.

But if you want to add salt when simmering dried beans in water, go ahead and do so. They will soften -- the only thing is that you'll have to simmer them longer, and so pay a bit more in cooking fuel to get them cooked.

The foam that you see during soaking and sometimes during cooking is, apparently, owing to the indigestible sugars leeching out.

Dried beans are best simmered in a wide pot, so that they cook evenly.

Beans absorb the flavour of what they are cooked with. You can add to the cooking water chunks of celery, onion or carrot. Some kind of meat added to the cooking water, such as a pork bone or piece of pork, will both flavour the Beans and add fat to the water, which helps to tenderize the Beans. For a vegetarian approach, add a tablespoon of olive oil to the cooking water instead. Fat seems to go well with beans: the New Englanders added pieces of pork saltback, the Tuscans added olive oil; the Mexicans added lard.

For those times when you didn't have time for the "pre-soaking", here are two quick methods.

Quick soaking methods

1. In saucepan, cover Beans with 2 inches (5 cm) of water. Bring to a boil, let boil for 2 minutes, let sit in the hot water for 1 hour.
2. In saucepan, cover Beans with 2 inches (5 cm) of water. Bring to a boil, let boil for 10 minutes, drain, cover again with 2 inches (5 cm) of water, let soak for 30 minutes.

For both methods, make sure the dried beans you are using are relatively "fresh" dried beans. If you've or the store have had them around for a year or more, they will need a full, long, proper soak.

Pressure Cooker Beans

If you already think that cooking dried Beans from scratch is a lot of bother, or are flat out terrified of pressure cookers, you can just skip this section.

The jury is still out on whether it is worth cooking Beans in a pressure cooker. In terms of how long the burner on the stove has to be on, the cooking time is about half or less, depending on the Beans you are cooking -- but then you have to let the pressure cooker sit off the heat for a while longer. It's no extra work to do that, but at the end of it you don't actually save any time, though you will save on cooking fuel.

When pressure cooking Beans you have to put lots and lots of water in (after all, you can't just peek in on a pressure cooker unless you are planning on a do-it-yourself facelift). When adding water, keep under the safety limits prescribed in your pressure cooker manual (many manuals seem to say no more than a third full of water and Beans). Beans rehydrate while cooking, and soak up a lot of the water. If you're going to pre-soak or Quick Soak, doing it before cooking in a pressure cooker might be the time to do it, as then they would soak up less of the water in the cooker -- but in doing this, you can see your time-savings fly out the window.

Certain Beans such as black beans, lima and soya beans can clog the steam vent with foam, which you won't want to happen -- seriously. Some pressure cooker manuals give these guidelines:

Don't fill more than 1/3 full to keep the foam well away from the rocker at the top;

Add a tablespoon of oil -- this prevents loose skins from floating free and clogging up the cooker's valve;

Don't leave the pressure cooker unattended until it is off the heat and in the resting stage. If the rocker stops jiggling or emitting steam, you have foam or bean skins blocking the valve. Remove from the heat immediately, and cool it right away in a sink of cold water. When the pressure cooker can be opened, do so and finish cooking the Beans in a normal pot of water. If a valve is blocked, it has to be thoroughly cleaned or it will just block again.

There are many converts to cooking Beans in a pressure cooker, but just as many people still prefer a pot of boiling water because it gives them more control. With a traditional boiling method you can see if the Beans want more water, you can mash one from time to time to see if they are ready and then when they are, stop cooking them right away. And as for the time savings of boiling versus pressure-cooking, well, while the Beans are simmering away in a regular pot you can do whatever you please.

To flavour Beans, smoky ham hocks work great. Use 1 ham hock per 1 pound (450g) of Beans.

Nutrition for Beans

Beans and farting

Beans contain complex sugars called oligosaccharides that normal digestive enzymes in the upper intestine can't process. The sugars pass unprocessed into our lower intestines where there is a bacteria population that can eat these sugars, in effect fermenting them and producing carbon dioxide gas as a waste product.

Mature dried Beans contain the most oligosaccharides. Young fresh peas and snap beans are the least offensive legumes to eat. Some say that lima beans and navy beans -- as in good old baked beans -- produce the most gas. The gas itself is odourless. But other foods that you eat along with them have their own aromas as they are digested, and this is what you smell. Members of the onion family including leeks and garlic contain sulphurs. If you have these in your stomach along with bean gas to carry the odour out, well.

Some people say that soaking and changing the soaking water several times, and then cooking in fresh water, and then replacing the water half-way through cooking helps to leach out the gas-producing sugars. The science is that the oligosaccharides hydrate more quickly than other compounds in the beans, so are more quickly and easily drawn into the water than those. Most people, however, say this makes no appreciable difference; you're just as well to don a grass hoolah skirt and dance around the stove. Besides, you're tossing down the sink the flavourful, nutrient-rich stock from the Beans.

In Indian cuisine, it is believed that adding garlic and ginger helps reduce the gas. (If nothing else, it would certainly make the gas more fragrant.) Some people say that when Beans are a regular part of your diet, gas tends to be less of a problem because your stomach develops enzymes to process the oligosaccharides. They advise that starting out with 1/2 cup of cooked Beans a day for a few months helps your stomach to get used to them. If you stop eating Beans daily and don't have them again for a long interval, you apparently have to start developing the enzyme all over again. It's difficult to know what the truth of this is: whether your stomach gets used to the Beans, or if you get used to being "windy". Some people say they have tried this daily Bean eating routine for up to a year, but never progressed past the stage of getting kicked out of bed at night by their nearest and dearest.

Bean products which are already fermented, such as black bean sauce, tofu, tempeh, etc, lose their oligosaccharide sugars during processing and so don't cause this flatulence.

Equivalents for Beans

1 cup of beans, either dried, or cooked and drained, weighs 6 oz / 170g (if you're wondering how 1 cup of both dried and cooked beans can weigh the same, given that cooked beans have absorbed water and are heavier, it's because the cooked beans have expanded with the water, meaning that fewer of them can fit in a cup. The amount that does happen to fit into a cup happens to weigh the same as the greater number of dried beans that will fit into the cup.)

1 cup dry beans = 2 1/2 cups cooked
1 pound (450g) dry beans = 2 1/2 cups dry beans = 6 cups cooked
2 cups cooked beans, drained = 14oz = 400g

Storage Hints for Beans

When you cook beans from dried, you're best to cook far more than you need for the current meal. Cooked beans freeze really well. Freeze them in deli-sized containers so that you have control over how much you thaw at once. They thaw really quickly in a dish or sink of hot water, or if you are putting them into a soup or stew, you can just throw them in half-thawed and let the heat of the stew do the rest.

Freezing beans lets you have beans ready whenever you want, without having to resort to tinned beans or desperately trying to shave 15 minutes off the cooking time with a pressure cooker.

Beans will clump when they are frozen, though they thaw back into individual beans. If you want to prevent this, toss them lightly with a very small amount of oil.

History Notes for Beans

Before the discovery of the New World, Beans had been used for millennia in the Old World. The beans were those such as fava (broad) beans and black-eyed peas. Only with the New World, however, did we acquire the most common Beans now in use, Beans such as lima, kidney, navy beans, string beans, runner beans, etc.

The ancient Egyptians grew Beans and ate them, but thought them "unclean" because they thought Beans contained the souls of the dead. (Gee, maybe after a Bean supper they could hear the souls of the dead talking to them?) Consequently, the upper class avoided them and only common people ate them.

Greek priests were forbidden to eat Beans. Pythagoras, a 6th century Greek philosopher, advised people to abstain from Beans. It's unsure why: he didn't elaborate. Maybe because Beans were thought at the time to hold aphrodisiac qualities; maybe a hangover of the Egyptian "souls of the dead" belief; maybe Pythagoras was one of the few people in the Mediterranean who genetically are allergic to broad beans; maybe he was advising them to stay away from politics -- he may have meant the different coloured Beans used in the Greek voting system. Or, he may not have wanted them passing wind in his lecture halls. He was killed, in fact, when a mob caught him on the edge of a bean field, which he refused to enter while fleeing from them. (Another thing which makes some historians think that he was allergic to Beans.)

The Romans didn't have any of these qualms about Beans. Beans, lentils and peas were the main source of protein for the ordinary masses, the Legions and Gladiators -- though the wealthy would avoid them, thinking them plain and humble food. Romans also offered Beans in sacrifices to some of their gods.

In the Middle Ages Beans were consumed throughout Europe; the earliest known Beans in Britain are from the Iron Age at Glastonbury.

Broad beans (aka fava / faba) were the only Beans known to Europeans before 1492. The Chinese had black-eyed peas.

In South and Central America, the natives not only ate Beans with corn or grains, they also grew them together right in the same fields and patches. The combination of Beans and grains in their diet, as we now know from nutrition studies, gave them a complete protein -- and it benefitted the soil.

There is also an ancient English custom of including a whole bean in a special fruit cake baked especially on Twelfth Night. The man who receives the piece with the bean in it is proclaimed king for the night. There would also be a pea; the woman who found it would be pronounced Queen. If a woman found the bean, she got to pick the king, and vice versa if the man found the pea. The King and Queen would then direct the entertainment for the night and give orders to their "court".

Literature & Lore

Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) had this advice for newlyweds:
"Keep them to wholesome foods confin'd, Nor let them taste what causes wind:
‘Tis this the sage of Samos means, Forbidding his disciples beans."

Despite the great wealth of the nobility in Florence, the people in the surrounding countryside of Tuscany were actually quite poor. They ate Beans a great deal, and still love today. Other Italians still call Tuscans (people in Tuscany) "mangia fagioli", meaning "bean eaters."

To spill the beans: an old expression dating back to the 16th century.

The 19th century in America brought other bean expressions: "full of beans", "doesn't know beans", "doesn't amount to a hill of beans" and "beanpole" (applied to tall thin people.)

The 20th century also gave us bean expressions: "bean-counters", meaning accountants, and "slam that fridge door one more time and I'm going to bean you."

Four beans in a row,
One for the rook,
One for the crow,
One to rot, and one to grow.

Language Notes

The scientific Latin names for some Beans begins with "Phaseolus" or "vigna." Phaseolus, which means boat, is an allusion to the pod.

There are three main groupings of Beans:

• Phaseolus vulgaris, otherwise known as "common bean", includes kidney beans, navy beans, etc;
• Phaseolus lunatus includes lima beans;
• The vigna group, grown more in Asia, includes adzuki and mung beans.

  Acknowledgements

  Clarke, Melissa. A GOOD APPETITE; Secrets of the Bean Pot. New York Times. 30 March 2011.

Harold McGee on Salt. New York Times. 9 August 2009. Retrieved May 2011 from http://dinersjournal.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/08/09/harold-mcgee-on-salt/

Riley, Gillian. The Oxford Companion to Italian Food. Oxford University Press. 2007. page 47.

Also called:

Baked Beans, Bush Beans, Chana Dal, Cowpeas, Dry Beans, Flageolet Beans, French Fillet Beans, Green Beans, Lima Beans, Mung Beans, Pole Beans, Red Kidney Beans, Runner Beans, Shelling Beans, Soybeans, Wax Beans

Peas