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Beans & Legumes, Dried
Velvety smooth, well-cooked beans are both delicious and digestible. Hard beans are neither. The three secrets to bean cookery are: soak, simmer and kombu. With these basics there’s bowls of pleasure ahead.
Three Bean Cooking Secrets
1. Soak - Nature programs all seeds to lie dormant and hard until warm spring rains soak and soften them. A good soak hydrates and “awakens” the beans and they start to sprout. Note: mung dal and urad dal do not require soaking as their hard to digest properties are removed.
Split open a well soaked bean and you’ll find more than two halves of one bean. You’ll find its swollen sproutlet burgeoning with vitality. This sprouting process consumes the phytates (anti-nutrients) and makes the beans easier for us to digest. Additionally, the beans hard to digest sugars (oligosaccharides) leach out into the soaking water and are discarded.
2. Simmer - Don’t Boil Secret number two is simmering. Boiling toughens (coagulates) the bean’s protein whereas cooking at a slow simmer softens it. Simmering is when there are a few, small bubbles on the cooking surface. Boiling means lots of big bubbles as the hot fluid vaporizes.
3. Kombu - Lastly, I always cook beans with a strip of kombu sea weed, and I recommend the same to you. Mineral-rich kombu imparts a delicious meaty flavor to the beans plus it’s enzymes are a natural and healthful tenderizer. Before serving the beans you may stir kombu into the beans or remove it as you would a bay leaf. With long cooking, however, the kombu dissolves into the beans and helps thicken the broth. Kombu is available at quality food stores, natural food stores and on the internet.
A slow cooker is ideal for bean cooking as it simmers them to melting perfection. Add soaked beans to the cooker before work turn on and be welcomed home to great pot of beans. Pressure cooking saves energy and reduces cooking time by 2/3, however the high temperature destroys the beans heat sensitive B vitamins.
How NOT to Cook Beans
Beans more than a year old become tough and so require extra soaking and simmering time. If your water is hard, add a pinch of baking soda to the soaking (but not cooking) as water enables the beans to soften. Lastly, if you’re seasoning the beans with an acid food (like tomatoes, citrus, or wine) wait until the beans are soft before adding the tomatoes.
Yield: 1 cup of dry beans makes 2 to 3 cups cooked beans.
1 cup dry beans, picked over and rinsed
1 teaspoon cumin seed, 1 bay leaf and/or one garlic clove (optional)
1 3-inch strip kombu sea weed (optional)
¼ teaspoon sea salt
Place the beans in a bowl with water to cover by 3 inches and soak (preferably in tepid water) for 4 to 12 hours or until the beans are fully hydrated. If possible, change their soaking water to fully remove anti-nutrients.
Drain out and discard the soaking water. Rinse the beans, place them in a large pot, add water to cover by 1 inch, and bring to a simmer. Simmer with the lid off for 5 minutes or so and skim off and discard any foam that rises to the surface. Add cumin, bay, garlic and kombu. Place the lid ajar and continue simmering until the beans are soft—approximately ½ hour for lentils, dal and split peas, 1 ½ hours for chickpeas and 1 hour for other beans. During cooking, add additional water, if necessary, to keep the beans submerged. Season with salt and cook the salt into the beans for an additional 5 minutes or so.
For a creamy texture, use a potato masher or large spoon to mash some or all of the beans.
Garnish with cilantro and serve beans as a side dish, or add them to a soup or casserole of your choice or fold them in a tortilla or taco.
