Sara Pitzer - Cooking with Dried Beans

by Sara Pitzer

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Pitzer, Sara

Cooking with dried beans / by Sara Pitzer

A Storey Publishing Bulletin, A-77

ISBN 0-88266-291-0

Dried beans are good food. People have been eating them for at least 8,000 years. Today we have our regional favorites in every part of the country Boston baked beans in New England, refried beans on the West Coast, chili in Texas, red beans and rice in Louisiana. We like beans because they taste good. And in this case, our tastes are nutritionally sound.

Cooked dried beans provide B vitamins: niacin, thiamin, riboflavin, B6, and folic acid; minerals: calcium, phosphorus, magnesium, sulfur and potassium, plus traces of iron, manganese, and copper. Dried beans provide almost as much fiber per serving as bran and as much protein as 2 eggs or pound of hamburger. While the protein in dried beans is incomplete, beans in combination with grains or dairy products provide all the essential amino acids of complete protein.

All this for only about 225 calories per cup of cooked beans.

For all this, most of us dont eat beans as often as we might because we tend to run out of ideas for cooking them once weve made bean soup, baked beans, and chili.

The recipes in this collection include regional favorites from all over the country, along with recipes that have become my familys favorites during the years Ive experimented with good ways to cook beans. Ive not included any of those bizarre recipes that tend to pop up when one is looking for the greatest number of ways possible to use a particular food. Recipes exist for bean cake with vanilla frosting and bean pie with meringue; some people undoubtedly would find them tasty and exotic, but appealing to the esoteric tastes among us is not my goal. I want to introduce you to the possibilities for using dried beans as good, basic, day-to-day standard fare, the kinds of dishes that are so good you want to prepare them again and again, and you rely on them when you want to feed people something you know theyll like.

As you browse through the recipes, you may discover some calling for a bean you cant find where you live, because a few beans still seem to be popular only in certain parts of the country. In these cases, just substitute another similar bean. The following list and descriptions should help you.

Baby Limas. These are the same baby limas you grow in your garden. You can dry your own if you grow extra. And you can buy them anywhere. They are one of the faster cooking beans.

Butter Beans. These are the large limas you grow in your garden. These, too, are a good variety to dry yourself. You can buy them everywhere in the country in grocery stores.

Great Northern Beans. Great northerns are a meaty, plump bean, somewhat larger than navy beans, commercially grown mostly in Idaho. They are good to use when you want the cooked bean to be quite soft or when you want to make a puree. You can buy them all across the country.

Marrow Beans. Marrows look something like a fat baby lima. Theyre similar in size and texture to great northerns and are interchangeable with them. Although you may not find them in all grocery stores, theyre generally sold everywhere in the country.

Navy Beans, Pea Beans, Small White Beans. Although we have 3 names, they seem to represent only 2 bean varieties. Commercial labeling on them is confusing. Navy beans, which are grown mainly in Michigan, are smaller than great northerns, but larger than the small whites grown in California. Pea beans sometimes refers to navy beans and sometimes means a small white bean (though not necessarily grown in California). To confuse matters more, some packages are marked, Navy Pea Beans. Dont worry too much about the names. These beans are pretty much interchangeable, although the small white (or pea) bean is smaller and firmer than the standard navy beans. These beans are available, under one name or another, everywhere. Usually they are the cheapest of the white beans.

Red Kidney Beans. Of all the kidney beans, these are the darkest, being deep red when dried and turning almost purple-black when cooked. They are often used in chili and are grown from coast to coast. They do well in the home garden and are a good choice for drying yourself.

Light Red Kidney Beans. Another popular choice for chili, these look just like dark red kidney beans except for being lighter in color. When cooked they look like pintos and pinks, a rosy brown. Theyre available from coast to coast, although some grocery stores carry only red or light red, not both. They can substitute for dark red kidney beans.

Cranberry Beans. Sometimes called shellouts, cranberry beans are a mottled pink and beige bean, a little smaller than kidney beans, typically found in the East and practically impossible to find on the West Coast.

Pinto Beans. These are common in the West and Southwest and look like cranberry beans except they are pale pink spotted with brown.

Pink Beans. Pinks look like pintos without the spots. Pinks, pintos, and cranberry beans are interchangeable. You never know where you will find pink beans. They seem to be available all over the country, but not in all grocery stores.

Small Red Beans. These beans are a bright red, sometimes called a red pea bean and sometimes called Mexican chili bean. They are smaller, firmer, and less mealy than kidney beans. Common in the West and Southwest, they are hard to find in some parts of the East, but when you can find them, they make a nice change from kidney beans and give a completely different character to chili. When you cant get them, any of the other pink or red beans may be substituted, although the results will be somewhat different.

Black-Eyed Peas, Yellow-Eyed Peas. Both of these are oval, with a black or yellow spot in the curve. They are actually beans, but are always called peas in the south where they are traditional. They cook faster than most dried beans and have a smooth, rather than mealy, texture when cooked. Although you can use black-eyed and yellow-eyed peas interchangeably, which is good because the yellow variety is hard to find in some places, nothing else substitutes properly for them. But you can find one variety or the other almost everywhere.