Cooking my 25 year old rred and pinto beans

I posted before about my old beans..........   This is kind of an update and review..........

So I have two 5 gal home depot paint buckets with snap on lids that I filled up with mostly red and pinto beans with another bucket with rice as my doomsday food storage at the
turn of the century ( 1999  ) and put them in the basement that hovers between 60 F and 70 F year round.   These beans will not soften no matter how much I cook them....   ( I tried 5 or 6 hours.... and again the next day etc.   I determined the beans were cooked but just not soft.    MY SOLUTION
is to cook no more than double the standard cook time and then drain all liquid and  pulverize in a food processer which basically turns out
re-fried beans mush ( like mashed potatoes etc )that is great with chunks of meat, cornbread or tortillias or crackers etc.    I feel like all the nutrition is there, there are no spoiling or bug issues etc.  ( Early on, I did find that I needed to place all the 2 and 5 pound bags of beans in the freezer at 15 degrees F   for 24-36 hours  to kill any bugs or eggs that might have been in the bags.)   I really have no idea what the minimum time is but I tried always to get at least a day or two...sometimes a week or two etc.

And this is why I don't do the prepping thing, I don't want this situation to happen to me.

I'm glad though you're finding a way to finally get it used up though.

Riona Abhainn wrote:And this is why I don't do the prepping thing, I don't want this situation to happen to me.

I'm glad though you're finding a way to finally get it used up though.

I recently took two pounds of dried pinto beans ( 25 yrs old ) put them into the grinder first and made a course powder before I cooked them.
Now they cook in the normal time with the right amount of water and you get something like mashed potatoes but they are beans instead.

That is what I have found to cook very old beans.

I'm curious if they would germinate anymore? If you grow new beans and harvest them, you would have fresh beans.

Personally I would use a food safe bucket and not one that had any kind of chemicals in it.

Joe Battaion wrote:Personally I would use a food safe bucket and not one that had any kind of chemicals in it.

I always leave the red or pinto beans in the plastic airtight bag from the grocery store.   I think any chemicals from a plastic bucket would have a hard time getting through the plastic bags.  

Jeremy VanGelder wrote:I'm curious if they would germinate anymore? If you grow new beans and harvest them, you would have fresh beans.

I'm curious if the red and pinto beans from the grocery store would germinate even when fresh ?   There are many different kinds of beans and lentils etc,   I wonder which ones germinate the best when fresh and when stored a long time ?  Maybe some of the different beans and lentils do better than others.

This scenario is why I think at least some folks prefer to have say a year or a few months of stuff, and just rotate through it. If I were to go that route (I buy some in bulk that takes a 5 gal bucket to store, but not most things), I'd say buy 3 months at a time, using up the oldest stuff as my newer food arrives, so I'd always have say 6-12 months of staple foods available. Or even just 3 months, buying a month at a time and using that oldest month, so a big storm or pandemic that affects access to food for a bit doesn't cause a crisis.