Cooking your bean grex

It's snowy and below freezing where I am, so what better thing to do while drinking my coffee than to think about beans?!

I'm quickly moving my gardening style towards the "landrace everything" school of growing, but I'm curious about how folks are cooking with their mixed up dry beans. Are we just throwing them all in a pot together or is anyone taking the time to separate out different types? What recipes work well with your bean mixes? Tell me your bean secrets!

As I harvest beans I separate then.

I don't always dry them as I like fresh beans.

I would recommend 15 Bean Soup. It is okay if there are not 15 different beans:

https://www.allrecipes.com/recipe/105518/the-best-bean-and-ham-soup/

I always cook my mixed beans together. It would take a long time to sort them by color and shape. My grex includes about 10 different phenotypes. I suppose if I really wanted to select for the finest details of taste and texture, it might be worth doing. But time is precious and my palate just isn't very sophisticated.

Anne Miller wrote:As I harvest beans I separate then.

I don't always dry them as I like fresh beans.

I would recommend 15 Bean Soup. It is okay if there are not 15 different beans:

https://www.allrecipes.com/recipe/105518/the-best-bean-and-ham-soup/

That looks delicious! Then again, I think you could probably cook just about anything with a ham bone and have it come out tasty  

Jake Esselstyn wrote:I always cook my mixed beans together. It would take a long time to sort them by color and shape. My grex includes about 10 different phenotypes. I suppose if I really wanted to select for the finest details of taste and texture, it might be worth doing. But time is precious and my palate just isn't very sophisticated.

I hear you on time being precious! Do you usually use your beans for soup or...? We eat a lot of refried beans in our house, and I'm curious how that would turn out with different cooking times, etc.

I ordered some lofthouse landrace dry beans from experimental farm network for spring. I expect to save seed my first two years for a large planting before eating any. So I haven't cooked my own yet.

However, we eat a lot of beans here. I buy from the store, whatever looks good to me, or on sale. I dump the beans in a bucket to mix them up. Then when we're ready for more beans. We soak them overnight and cook em up. Usually in a broth, with seasoning. It takes about 2 hours for them to cook to a mashable, but firm texture.

All mixed together.

All mixed up. When the softest of them have turned into a thick broth and the firmest are soft enough to eat, you have a pleasant mixed spectrum of textures that work well together.