Cooking with Dry Beans and Peas

i ve just discovered that green pea sprouts go well with full-grain rice. just add them when the rice is nearly finished.

i had "overgrown" sprouts which allready had green vines (with some chewy fibers). but that tastes very good.

i m sure it ll work with other cooked grains, too

Tobias Ber wrote:i ve just discovered that green pea sprouts go well with full-grain rice. just add them when the rice is nearly finished.

i had "overgrown" sprouts which allready had green vines (with some chewy fibers). but that tastes very good.

i m sure it ll work with other cooked grains, too

That sounds delicious. Thanks for sharing.

it is... i somewhat slow-cooked them. i left the pot on the stove-plate. some starches and lots of flavour went into the broth. really good. a bit more of it would make a nice pea soup. maybe one should blend/grind a part of it to get a soup that is both creamy and contains whole peas/sprouts.

Dumb question time - how long can you keep cooked beans/peas/lentils in the fridge?

Vera Stewart wrote:Dumb question time - how long can you keep cooked beans/peas/lentils in the fridge?

Nothing dumb about that question.

I'm so nervous about recommending food safety things like this because what I do and what the government recommends are usually very different. So I ran over to The Canadian government's safe food storage list to see what they have to say... and apparently they don't think anyone would want to eat cooked pulses, level on store them.

So... let's just say it's up to the individual to be alert to their food safety... and you can do what I do at your own risk.

I will keep cooked beans at room temperature for one to two days, but heat them up to a full boil before eating. By day three, I've had an unpleasant looking scum form on top of the beans, which I think is koji mold (a friendly mold that is actually quite good for you), but I didn't want to risk it.

In the fridge, I'll keep the cooked pulses in their cooking liquid for about 8 days. I feel the cooking liquid reduces the amount of oxygen that gets to the beans, and helps them last longer - but I have no data to back this up, it's just a feeling I have. I suspect they might last longer than that, but I don't like to push it. I always smell my food and check for spoilage before eating it.

If you want to keep the beans for more than a few days, perhaps the freezer might help. Freezing cooked beans looks easy enough. I remember seeing somewhere a guide on how to freeze it in glass jars if plastic bags aren't your thing.

I hate to wait for such a long time (soaking and cooking) before being able to use beans for a recipe so for me I have found the best solution but - that's just me!

I soak and cook beans in big batches and preserve them in kilner jars. That way, if I want to use beans tonight, I just open a jar and create something. At the moment in the larder, I have many jars of chick peas, red kidney beans, black beans, brown lentils, large white kidney beans (that grow very well in this area called Tarbais beans and that are used for Cassoulet), as well as red lentils.

Red kidneys are of course the best for chili con carne but they make great stews also. Chick peas I often cook as a curry with any greens available and I make houmous and salads of course,they also go really well in a stew with spicy Spanish chorizo. The brown lentils lend themselves perfectly to accompany pork or bacon, also good in winter salads, while black beans are perfect for bean burgers. The white beans as mentioned above are for Cassoulet, baked beans, soups and stews of any description, I even do a kinf of houmous, but just mashed up, not blitzed. Red lentils I use in soups and indian dahls.

To R Ranson: I'd go easy with the turmeric in your dahl, it could turn bitter.

I soak and cook beans in big batches and preserve them in kilner jars. That way, if I want to use beans tonight, I just open a jar and create something.

You can can cooked beans? That's amazing. I want to know more.

Hi R,

Easy really, just preserve them like any other food, just check on your altitude as that would make a difference to the sterilising time. Are you familiar with canning?

I know enough about canning to know I need to follow a recipe. Something about acids and sugars and dangers with pasteurized foods that haven't been completely pasteurized. In other words, I don't know not enough to make my own recipe up.

I'm guessing, beans aren't an acid food, so they would want pressure canning.

My guess is that Olga is referring to Pressure Canning.

I use a pressure canner - American as it happens, that came all the way from the US. You guys make the best! It is expensive but to me it is one of my best investments. I got it on Amazon US.

Otherwise, if you use a normal container to sterilise, use double the time for each recipe, make sure the cans are covered at all time with a couple of inches of water and if you need to add water at any time during the operation it has to be boiling water. If in doubt, let it cool in the water and sterilise again the next day for half the time. You'll have to get a booklet to give you the time to do each food. There are lots of books out there to help you out. I make soups and stews as well as fruits and compotes, but then in the South of France there is along tradition of canning food.

R Ranson wrote:Anyone here make hummus? Anyone make it without an electric tool? My blitzer and blenders are both on the fritz, and I really don't want to go out and buy new (or used) ones... but without them, no home made hummus.

While we're at it. What's your hummus recipe like? There are so many variations. My favourite goes like this:

Chickpeas
Garlic
Lemon/lime juice
salt
sesame/olive oil

Mix and blend, adjust ingredients to taste.

We make hummus with Amplissimo Viktoria Peas, a pole variety of dry pea we originally got from Fedco Seeds. We call them our Midwest "chick" peas - they grow easily here. The peas cook quickly and are easy to mash with a potato masher to a rustic consistency. We add vinegar to which a drop or two of organic lemon essential oil is added, instead of lemon juice. We also add freshly roasted and ground cumin and coriander, garlic, and either olive or local camelina oil. We've also used cannellini white beans as a substitute for garbanzos. Different but tasty in its own way.

R Ranson wrote:Anyone here make hummus? Anyone make it without an electric tool? My blitzer and blenders are both on the fritz, and I really don't want to go out and buy new (or used) ones... but without them, no home made hummus.

We made some hummus recently using a foley food mill, the one we use for making tomato puree and ketchup, etc. It's like a colander with a hand crank that squashes the stuff down through the holes. Honestly it was kind of a lot of work, though might have been better if our chickpeas had been cooked softer, I don't know.

at the moment i am growing (indoor on window sill) some pea-soil-sprouts. the dried peas from the supermarket germinate extremely well (99%). i use deep window boxes. people use flat trays for soil sprouts (wheat grass etc.). this makes no sense, they dry out too quickly and watering often will encourage mold-growth on the surface.

in these deep boxes, the sprouts find enough water. so i can do deep watering (poke holes into soil). the surface stays dry and that prevents molds. from growing. at the bottom of the boxes i added kitchen scraps and some soil from the worm farm (with earth worms). when i replant the soil-sprouts, i ll try to dig-under the remains and add additional kitchen scraps for the worms. i added a bit of wood-branches to get a mini-hügel-kultur-effect in these planters


how do you like to eat pea-sprouts/greens? i like them raw, without anything. did you try cooking them? i imagine, they ll add lots of flavour to soups, sauces, salads, stir-fry-dishes etc.

will the pea-shoots regrow after cutting them?

Vera Stewart wrote:Dumb question time - how long can you keep cooked beans/peas/lentils in the fridge?

"Pease porridge hot,"

By Mother Goose

Pease porridge hot,

Pease porridge cold,

Pease porridge in the pot

Nine days old.

Source: The Dorling Kindersley Book of Nursery Rhymes (2000)



I make sure the soup boils for 15 mins each day, often spending the remainder time in a "haybox". Boil it for lunch, Still piping hot for dinner. Sometimes I add additional ingredients and it becomes a different soup. About 7 days is the most I've streatched it out.
***Your mileage may vary.

My "hay box" is a styrofom cooler with a wool blaket to wrap the the 8 quart pot.
I bring the recepie to s rolling boil, keep it there for 15 mins and stuff it in the box.
Ham and bean soup in 6 hours!

http://www.motherearthnews.com/diy/haybox-cooking-zmaz80jfzraw.aspx

So... apparently we can use black beans to make chocolate brownies. I NEED to know more about this. Anyone ever try it? Is it as delicious as it sounds? Would it taste good with adzuki beans which in my opinion are lovely and sweet.

There is one brownie recipe from my childhood that I love to make. It's especially good because it uses cocoa powder instead of chocolate (which is darn difficult and expensive to find without my allergens in it). My goal for this weekend is to convert this recipe to include black beans.

First task, soak some beans.

I'm amazed at the diverse ways beans and peas can be used and really taste great at the same time. I have Chinese friends who use beans in sweet dessert type recipes and the results are delish!

While beans don't cause me problems, I can't serve them when many of my friends come by because they complain of intestinal gas afterward. Has anyone found varieties of beans that cause less gas problems? And what about using beano? Does it work?

A lot of people, especially of European descent, have less problem digesting lentils, chickpeas, favas and lima beans than they do new world beans. Since they were such a main part of our ancestral diet, this makes sense that we've been 'selected' to be able to digest these traditional foods - people who couldn't, didn't survive long enough to reproduce. The fibre in these beans are usually soluble, which I find much easier to digest than the currently popular insoluble fibre in a lot of health foods these days.

Some people find it easier to digest sprouted then cooked beans, than if the beans were simply cooked from dry. Other people swear that soaking works wonders, and others tell me that cooking right from dry is the best way to make beans digestible.

I think it's very much an individual thing, as our gut microbes are all a bit different.

Through trial and error, I've come up with some opinions on how to get people use to eating beans. 1, start small... 1/4 cup of dry beans spread out through the week, for the first month, double it the next month, and so on until their bodies learn to love beans. 2, combine beans with live culture foods to stimulate digestion. 3, use beans that have common ancestry with the individual.

I'm amazed at the diverse ways beans and peas can be used and really taste great at the same time. I have Chinese friends who use beans in sweet dessert type recipes and the results are delish!

Speaking of sweet beans, my Japanese friend ran out of adzuki beans, so she used lima beans to make the dessert. It was amazing.

Making hummus without an electric tool

Run fully cooked garbanzo beans/chick peas through a food mill. Then mix in the other ingredients.

I have my grandmother's two Foley food mills (larger & smaller, with red wooden handles) that were probably new in the 1950s or so. Food mills are a great, nonelectric, multipurpose scratch cooking tool.

Here is a link to pictures for a visual reference for anyone not familiar with a (vintage) food mill:
http://www.ebay.com/itm/Vintage-Red-Foley-Food-Mill-Ricer-Masher-Strainer-Juicer-Canning-Hand-Crank-Wood-/262251525408?hash=item3d0f68b520:g:Z34AAOSwiwVWSjFn

Larisa Walk wrote:

R Ranson wrote:Anyone here make hummus? Anyone make it without an electric tool? My blitzer and blenders are both on the fritz, and I really don't want to go out and buy new (or used) ones... but without them, no home made hummus.

While we're at it. What's your hummus recipe like? There are so many variations. My favourite goes like this:

Chickpeas
Garlic
Lemon/lime juice
salt
sesame/olive oil

Mix and blend, adjust ingredients to taste.

We make hummus with Amplissimo Viktoria Peas, a pole variety of dry pea we originally got from Fedco Seeds. We call them our Midwest "chick" peas - they grow easily here. The peas cook quickly and are easy to mash with a potato masher to a rustic consistency. We add vinegar to which a drop or two of organic lemon essential oil is added, instead of lemon juice. We also add freshly roasted and ground cumin and coriander, garlic, and either olive or local camelina oil. We've also used cannellini white beans as a substitute for garbanzos. Different but tasty in its own way.

Chickpea hummus - my mouth is sad if I don't get any cumin & coriander in my hummus! We love our hummus with plenty of lemon and garlic, but we tend to go light on the tahini (sesame seed paste) and olive oil.

I make a white bean dip I believe is supposed to be of Hungarian origin. I use navy beans, then add garlic, olive oil, lemon, thyme, sweet paprika, salt, and pepper.

I made some black bean brownies today,replacing the coconut oil with grapeseed, and the agave syrup with maple syrup. It tasted good, but not like I was expecting. With brownies, I expect a certain taste and texture, but this was a bit disappointing. So I call it bean cake, and it's very delicious that way.

I like foods that honour the ingredients, not try to be something they are not. This cocoa bean cake is fantastic, but it's definitely not my idea of brownies.

I use pinto beans, Anasazi's, black beans, small and large lima beans, and mayocoba Peruvian beans.
I have been eating beans for about 80 years. I cook them the same way my mom cooked pinto beans.

I cook about 2 cups at a time.
I dry sort the beans and remove any rocks, dirt whatever and then rinse well and drain.
Then in a heavy non aluminum pot I cover the beans with water and bring to boil. (Don't use cast iron
unless it's enameled as will probably rust the pan)..
Reduce heat to simmer them till done. Add water as necessary to prevent beans burning.
Salt to taste. If you wish to add red chile caribe or powder you can add it anytime during the cooking process.
I've never used any spices or add-ins with lima beans except for salt and pepper but maybe it would be alright?

To fry (refry) I add lard to a cast iron skillet and heat. I don't let the lard get hot enough to smoke.
I add beans a large spoonful at a time and mash according to the end use. Add in some of the bean juice
as necessary to thin. Don't discard any bean juice, use it. It tastes great.

I never soak beans or use any accelerated methods to cook them as the taste is better when they are slow
simmered. I have tried pressure cookers for dry beans but taste is sacrificed for speed.

If you choose to soak beans cook them in the soak water instead of throwing out the flavor.
Diana Kennedy the famous cookbook author said it best in at least one of her cookbooks....
"Instead of throwing out the flavor, throw out the cookbook that told you to"
Diana Kennedy spent all those years in Mexico and wrote many good cookbooks on Mexican cooking.

I love making black beans in the slow cooker. I put it on high, so it does come to a bit of a boil.

I have been growing and saving seeds of Mammoth Melting Peas for several years now. I really recommend them as a new seed saver's first attempt at saving seeds. I noticed they are no longer in the SSE catalogue (where I first found them), but they must be available elsewhere. I grow them in spring and again in fall. We had an incredibly mild November/December this year, and I picked the last bunch in December! They have been fool-proof, gigantic, and delicious. I swear, every single seed sprouts. The only recipe for these guys is raw, by the fist-full.

I get a lot of questions from people regarding the bugs that eat the centers out of their peas. That prevents them from germinating. In some ecosystems, nearly every pea seed can be afflicted. The peas can be harvested slightly immature, dried quickly, and frozen to kill the bug's larva. But that sort of care and precision strikes me as being on the advanced seed saver's level, and not suited to beginners. For folks that live in an area not bothered by pea weevils, pea seed can be a great crop for beginning seed savers to work with.

Wow, I will count myself lucky that I have not encountered pea weevils! That sounds like a lot of work--but good to know that there is a solution.

We make use of lots of legumes in our diet and am happy to find more info on cultivating.

We grind several flours on a regular basis using a vita-mix blender. We do understand about deactivating the lectins with enough heat. We've found cooking baked goods in a microwave can generate sufficient heat and also manage to cook them all the way through. Our lentil flour muffins are pretty amazing and our false corn muffins made from coarsely ground chana dal makes really very good turkey dressing.

We have an eye for glycemic index in the formulation of our recipes and some legumes are often our preferred source of carbs.

For whole beans we most often use a pressure cooker. We often try to convince folks they need one. It's a huge time-saver. For smaller legumes like lentils or chana dal, we'll throw them in a soup or stew and put it in the thermal cooker -or even a thermos sometimes. If preheated properly they cook very thoroughly.

Do bean sprouts have the same toxic Phytohaemagglutnin (Bean Lectin)?

I'd like to learn how to test beans for raw edibility. Or does the sprouting process change them?

Joseph, could you educate us on how to taste the "bean poison"? Do you chew up a dry seed, or a soaked one? Is that flavor bitter, sour, or something else?

Rebecca: Not having bean sprouts in the house right now, I'll go ahead and offer my memory of the last time I sprouted beans, that sprouting doesn't get rid of the poisons. I'm chewing on a dry mung bean right now, which is a commonly sprouted bean. The taste is much milder than the kidney bean I was chewing on a few minutes ago. Cooking destroys the bean poison, which I suppose explains why we don't have a tradition of eating beans raw. They are always a cooked food.

The flavor I associate with bean poison is somewhat astringent. Makes my tongue feel numb. Feels a little bit like wanting to throw up. It's really easy to taste in something like a kidney bean. I just pop a bean into my mouth and suck on it till it softens. They could also be soaked in water for an hour or so.

I've been playing around with my bean cake (I refuse to call it brownies because that makes it taste bad, but if I call it bean cake, then it tastes exceptionally yummy). Anyway, I want to know the nutritional value of the recipe, including calories, but when I use an online calorie counter like Calorie Count, it only has dry adzuki or sweetened canned adzuki.

Does anyone know what 1.5 cups of cooked adzuki beans would be in dry beans? I'm thinking about 1/3rd cup of dry beans what do you think?

Edit - some sites say it's more like 1:3/Dry:cooked. When I plug in 1/2 cup it makes much more sense.

Just dropping some summary info in a photo attachment below. Better quality source of the image can be found here: http://www.fao.org/resources/infographics/infographics-details/en/c/382088/

https://food52.com/blog/16641-a-genius-minimalist-white-bean-soup-from-marcella-hazan

Here's a really good minimalist white bean soup.

As far as cooking beans goes, I gave up on the crockpot years ago. The temperatures are too low and you invariably have some relatively tough beans compared to what you get from the oven.

Over the years, this is how I have settled on cooking perfect beans every time:

1) If there's time, I soak them. If not, I don't. I'm pretty sure digestion has more to do with whether we have been eating legumes frequently enough to have necessary bacteria and enzymes to digest them than it does with soaking. I used to not be able to eat beans comfortably, now I can eat them like any other food. I think fermenting them for two days with a little bit of whey or liquid from a lactoferment is an interesting idea for anyone who currently does not have the ability to eat them.

2) Start them on the stovetop in a dutch oven. Cover with a couple of inches of water. Bring to a boil. You can add a chopped onion during this phase if you want. If your water is hard, add a tsp of baking soda. It makes a huge difference in the quality of the finished bean. As soon as I started adding baking soda to the water, I never had tough beans again. Butter soft and digestible every time.

3) Once boiling, cover with a lid and transfer to a 300 degree oven. Leave in oven 1.5 - 2.5 hours, checking the beans at the 1.5 hours mark. You might need to check them a bit earlier for more water and give them a stir.

4) Once the beans are soft, and you are going to eat them as is, you can add good quality salt. Don't add it earlier in the cooking process or they wills stay tough. They take up the salt nicely as soon as they are cooked. They usually need more salt that most recipes recommend to bring out their full flavor. If you're using the beans in another recipe, I'd leave them unsalted so you can adjust to the other recipe accordingly. It is true that you should not add acidic foods to uncooked beans. For the same reason you might want to add baking soda to the water, if you want beans soft like butter, the environment can't be too acidic.

Oh wow, K. That soup sounds amazing.

That's tomorrow's dinner!

It calls for 6 cups of cooked beans, what do you think, about two cups of dry beans?

Sounds about right! Or make a pot and have extras!

John Skaggs above mentioned grinding dry beans to a flour and I've been interested in doing this with cranberry beans. We have a hand-crank grain mill, several electric coffee bean mills, an older Osterizer blender, and a VitaMix with standard-issue (not 'dry blade') container. Any opinions on what would be best for grinding the beans for relatively small (2-person) meals of refried beans? The idea would be to cook the mixture a bit longer than normal to make sure all protein denaturation is complete. (The Osterizer has a glass container and the VitaMix is plastic.)

If I were going to make 'bean flour' my strategy would be to cook the beans first, then dehydrate them. Then grind them into meal. That would be easier on the equipment. It would also avoid the tendency towards under-cooking that is so common in ad-hoc recipes that use bean flour.

I used to make a lot of things out of pre-cooked (and then dehydrated) beans. Sure makes cooking with beans a lot easier and faster.

We have used a hand-crank grain mill (sunshine nugget grain mill with stainless burrs) for grinding small quantities of some legumes. Much depends on the size and type of legume, what burrs you have and how closely they are set. Larger beans may require 2 or more passes to reach a desired fineness. For us anyway, the investment in the dry Vitamix container was very worthwhile. Very quick and effective grinding to any fineness we choose. We are off-grid and the Vitamix uses a lot of juice, but for a very short time.

We would rather be rigorous in the cooking of legumes than go through the additional step of dehydration, though it would be helpful for some quick-prep situations.

Thanks for these responses. I think I will first try the Osterizer, since it already has a glass container, and see how well it pulverizes the dried beans....easy enough to test. The dry blade container for the Vitamix is a bit spendy, but if we find ourselves grinding more and more dried grains, it would be worth the investment as well. Again, thanks for the suggestions.

R Ranson wrote:Here's another bean related question for you all.

"They" say that adding acid, salt or things like tomatoes to beans while they are cooking makes something bad happen. There seems to be a lot of difference in opinion, and lots of exceptions to the rules.

What are your personal thoughts and experiences with adding salt, acid, or tomatoes to cooking beans?

There are several things you can do that will help beans be more digestible.

1) soak the beans in water with baking soda added (1TBS per half gallon of water). This does two things, first it de-gasses the beans and second it helps break down the poisons present.
The next step is to rinse the beans, no need to keep any of the baking soda in the water, it has done the job of breaking down the noxious qualities we don't want in our bean pot.

2) Boil or pressure cook in water only to the stage of al dente. If your slow cooker can reach a boil, super. If it won't then use that for the second part of cooking a brilliant pot of beans.
At this stage of cooking you are able to add acidic items to the pot without worries of bad things happening.
Never put acids (tomatoes do contain acids) into beans that are not almost fully cooked, since those poisons that have been mentioned will be released by the acid components of your dish, not good!

3) add some olive oil to the cooking water, this will help tenderize the seed coat and make the beans easier to digest as well as give a bit of buttery taste without using butter.

4) Once your beans are at the al dente stage, add your non acidic ingredients that take the longest to cook, then work towards the ones that take the least amount of cooking time.
Acidic items go in just before the salt, when you add the salt you should be around 10-15 minutes away from the end of cooking, this keeps those items fresher tasting in your dish.

If you want to cook up a pot of Boston style Baked beans you will go through steps 1-3 then get out your bean crock and add the mustard, molasses and brown sugar, put the lid on and place in the oven.
a touch of tarragon, basil, cilantro, cinnamon, nutmeg or what ever your taste buds love, can make a memorable pot of beans.