Monday, May 9, 2011

Beans 101

When I first started looking at storing food long-term, I noticed that everybody talked about storing food but nobody talked about eating it. And some of the food items people stored - or talked about storing - aren't what most people actually eat. Or sometimes even recognize as food. Lentils, for example, still perplex me somewhat.

The classic example of this is beans.

Beans are cheap. Easily available. Store forever. Great! They're also inedible in stored form, and damn near so even after you've soaked and cooked them. Beans, by themselves, taste like dung. So I thought I'd pass on my own experiences in rendering them not only edible but palatable.

I live at a fairly high altitude. One of the first things I learned about cooking beans was that it seemed to be impossible. I soaked them. I boiled them. I soaked and boiled the damn things until they fermented in the pot, and they were still crunchy. Turns out what I needed was a pressure cooker. This not only made the process possible, it reduced the time scale to a tolerable level.

But I've still found it desirable to cook the beans twice before I plan to eat them. So the first thing I do is just cook the beans - about fifteen minutes after the cooker starts venting. This leaves me with softish beans and some dark, nutritious liquid. It looks and tastes terrible.

Now I start adding ingredients. This is very highly variable. We've got a whole cabinet full of canned goods, some of which are getting pretty old. My approach to canned food is that it isn't really food, it's spice. For example, we have numerous flats of refried beans. I despise refried beans out of the can. But if I add a can of it to a pot of beans, it makes the whole thing taste good.

This is a fairly basic load for my favorite "recipe" - beans, broth, refried beans, corn, and fresh potatoes and an onion. Spice to taste. Canned chili also worked fantastically for this.

This is also an excellent way to get rid of those grody "food" items in #10 cans from Y2Que. Yes, we've still got some. I'm working on it.

What you end up with is delicious. It's delightful to the eyes. It lasts for a couple of days, which means it's like stone soup - you can just keep adding stuff till it's gone. If it doesn't come out right, you can doctor it to an amazing degree.

Point being, if you practice food storage, don't just put away a whole bunch of dried food and think you're golden. You and your family need to be willing and happy to eat the shite, so you should be working on how you're going to be ready to do that. In fact, live on the stuff for a while as you rotate your stock. It's fun!

4 comments:

Matt said...

Living at lowish altitude Beans cook okay in a crock pot for me. I have also found that if you can buy split pinto beans, they cook up great, fast and make terrific homemade refried beans. Split beans I think have to be purchased straight from the granary though.

I only store what I normally eat, no wheatberries, unidintifieable grains etc. Beans, rice, ramen, soups and lots and lots of seasonings for the above.

mdknighthawk said...

Add some rice and you'll have a complete protein

Scott McCray said...

Add a quart of canned venison and some rice and spices to some beans and you are good to go! MMMMMMM good!

Anonymous said...

Cumin + cayenne pepper + salt = party in your mouth. Works well for South West white bean chili. You can add any kind of meat to it. I haven't tried cat yet but when girlfriend's feline gives up the ghost I do want to see if he tastes like chicken.

You can probably grow Basil there by the ton in such an arid climate. I could eat pesto between two slices of dried dog sh t.

As for adding rice for the protein trifecta, I think it needs to contain the husk and or at least not be bleached.