Beans: Easy to cook, easy on your budget
BILL HOGAN / Chicago Tribune
Canned beans of many varieties, such as these on a Chicago supermarket shelf, can be used to make a hearty soup.
They're good for your heart, your budget and your palate.
One of nature's most nutritious foods - full of fiber and protein and virtually fat free - beans also are one of the market's cheapest. A pound of dried beans (easily enough to feed four people) costs less than $2; a 15-ounce can (the basis of a fine meal for two) runs about 75 cents.
And because they are such a great and healthy value, pretty much every culture has come up with a delicious way to cook them.
Few culinary tasks are as easy as opening a can of beans, but cooking dried beans from scratch is a close second. Kitchen lore about cooking beans abounds - soak, don't soak, salt, don't salt - all of which makes it sound a lot more complicated than it is.
Sorting and rinsing. Before you cook them, go through the dried beans to be sure there are no pebbles or other foreign objects, and remove any discolored or shriveled specimens. Rinse the beans by putting them in a bowl, covering them with cold water, then scooping them out with a slotted spoon.
Soaking. Soaking beans speeds up cooking because the beans already have begun to absorb water before you start to cook them. Traditionally, beans are either soaked in cold water overnight or subjected to a "quick soak" - placed in a pot with a few inches of cold water to cover, brought to a boil for two to three minutes, and then taken off the heat to sit, covered, for an hour.
When I happen to think about beans a day in advance of cooking them, I might soak them overnight. But usually I don't.
Salting. Another bit of traditional wisdom says you shouldn't salt beans while they cook because it will toughen the skins. I can find no scientific basis for this, and I have never found it to be true.
What I have found is that beans cooked in unsalted water taste like nothing. As they cook, beans triple in volume, and that increase is from the water they absorb. If that water has no taste, neither will the beans. I add about a tablespoon of kosher salt to the water in which I cook a pound of dried beans. (Acid in the cooking water will toughen beans, so add any lemon juice or tomatoes at the very end of cooking.)
Cooking. You can cook beans in just salted water, or you can add some aromatic vegetables. Make sure whatever else you put in the water is large enough to remove when the beans are done - the aromatics will be far too tasteless to serve. Quarter an onion through its root end and put it in the bean pot along with a couple of cloves of garlic, a few sprigs of parsley or a rib of celery, a carrot, a few bay leaves, and/or a ham hock, a chicken carcass, an expended rind of Parmesan.
Cover the beans with at least two inches of salted water, bring the whole works to a boil, then reduce the heat to a low simmer. Set the pot's cover askew, and then go do something else. Check on the beans every so often to make sure there is always some liquid covering them - if the level dips below an inch, add water.
Keep cooking until they are tender - this can take from one to four hours, depending on the size of the beans and how old they are. If there is too much liquid left at that point, uncover the pot, turn up the heat and boil, stirring often so the beans at the bottom don't burn.
Serving. Once the beans are cooked - or you have succeeded in opening a can - add them to a pan in which you've sauteed some onions, carrots and celery, and serve the mixture over rice or pasta. You could add some cut-up sausage, or extend the mixture with some broth and make a soup, some of which you could puree with a blender. Or chill the beans and combine with some chopped onion, celery and herbs and maybe some canned tuna for a hearty salad.
How to cope with the downside
If beans have a downside, it's that they are a leading cause of intestinal gas. Beans contain oligosaccharides, a complex sugar that is broken down by an enzyme that, unfortunately, human beings lack. Other sugars are broken down by enzymes in the small intestine; the constituent parts are then absorbed into the intestinal lining. But oligosaccharides make it all the way down to the large intestine, where bacteria break them down, imperfectly, into gas.
Much ink has been spilled on how to silence the musical fruit and halt any embarrassing or painful emissions. A popular remedy involves soaking the beans in water to which you've added some baking soda, then rinsing the beans and cooking them in fresh water. Critics of this method note that nutrients are lost along with the soaking water. They also say it doesn't work. Mexican cooks boil their beans with the herb epazote, which is said to reduce gas.
The one remedy with near-universal acclaim is the commercial product Beano, which comes in tablet and liquid form and is in the antacid section of supermarkets and pharmacies.
- Newsday