If you've read through much of this blog, you know I have a fixation on cooking beans. I do use canned beans, but I prefer cooking them myself. However. Just when I think I've got it all figured out, I'll cook some up that refuse to cooperate.
I bought an 8-lb bag of chickpeas from one of the Indian groceries here in town, and I have had terrible luck with them. They were a lot cheaper than the ones I'd had previously from Whole Foods, but they are taking forever to cook. Like, 3 hours or more. The last batch that I'd bought from Whole Foods cooked like a dream -- after soaking, they took barely an hour. And they tasted wonderful: sweet and rich. The ones I'm using now? They don't even taste that good, and the texture is weird. It's really aggravating.
I've had similar things happen with kidney beans -- the Baer's Best ones (a Massachusetts grower) cook up beautifully, by and large, but a large bag of kidney beans I bought just won't soften properly without that salt-water soak thing.
What's the lesson here? I'm guessing that it's an age issue. The ones I've had better luck with are fresher? But how do you always know? I have been toying with the idea of trying to find a buyer's club/co-op thing to buy bulk foods, but what if I buy, say, 20 lbs of chickpeas and find that they're not good ones? But what I'm doing now doesn't seem surefire, either, by any means.
All that said, an old friend from college who found me on Facebook suggested that I try using whey in the soaking water, a la Sally Fallon's book Nourishing Traditions. I tried that last night and I'll see how it goes. But I used it on a 1-lb. package of Baer's "money" beans, so I'm guessing that they'd have cooked up pretty well regardless of what I did.
8 comments:
torSo last fall I tried making bean soup and those darn beans just never got soft. I had pre-soaked and cooked them, and then cooked them into the soup, and then even after they sat around in the soup for a couple days and got reheated they didn't really get soft. I was so glad to see this post so that I know it's not just me!
I have awful luck cooking my own beans. I made some in a crock pot meal that I soaked for several hours and then crocked for 6 or so- still hard. Not cool when the family refuses to eat them... Wish we could figure out a better way.
Here's the thing (and this may even be its own post, though if I do that, I'll be hopelessly branding myself OBSESSED) -- the salt water soak really does work, even if you have tough beans. My problem has been that my default is NOT to salt the soaking water, so I get uneven results. It's just that sometimes it's not necessary, but there's no way to know that ahead of time (in my experience).
Anyway, bottom line is, I totally get why people rely on canned beans!!
Okay, so here is the sad thing. I was at Whole Foods YESTERDAY MORNING (for the first time in months), and I looked at the bulk chick peas and thought, "Should I? No, didn't Kate say she'd had problems with their chick peas?" So I didn't. But when this went up yesterday afternoon, I smacked my forehead.
Well. We're almost out of tortilla chips, so I guess I can make another trip...
Still, there are no guarantees. What if *that* batch I'd bought from Whole Foods was a fluke? This whole endeavor is so frustrating. I want to have a formula that WORKS. The damn things nourished the human race for frickin' millenia without canned available as a backup . . .
I know, I'm taking this a little too seriously.
Well, but beans are serious business. On that point, you will get nothing but agreement from me.
I'm guessing that before canned beans people just weren't that picky. :) I usually am not, but my family sure is. I'll try the salt water. Thanks!
Julia, I have more specific notes on the salt-soaking thing on another post . . . if you look in the side bar there's a category called "salt soaking beans." I just checked it myself b/c I'm doing it now.
Do note that you salt the soaking water, then after the soak, you drain and rinse well, and use fresh water for cooking, not salted. And, they tend to cook really FAST this way -- not necessarily a bad thing, but something to watch for. Let me know how it turns out for you!
Post a Comment