Beans, beans, the magical food storage item. Don't laugh.

[Rizzo]

Beans are some of the cheapest proteins you can store....if you aren't utilizing them in your food storage plan, you're missing out. My ward asked me to do a presentation on beans because no one else knew what to do with them.(no joke, *I* was the expert in my ward...pathetic right?)

Beans

The church recommends we store 60 lbs of beans/legumes per person per year.
Beans are really easy and convenient to use, cheap to buy, last up to 30 years in storage, and are an excellent low fat (zero) protein source (pinto beans have 14g of protein in 1 cup, plus fiber, iron and calcium) if eaten with a complex carb (like whole wheat bread).

A few suggestions for using beans:
• There are a few tricks for combatting the digestion issues with beans, but the best way is to slowly implement more into your diet so your body gets used to them. (This works, really.)
• Another method is to drain and rinse the beans after being soaked overnight…but this removes some nutrients, and the soaking liquid is good to cook with.
• Or, after draining and rinsing the soaked beans, you can boil the beans again in a pot of water with a teaspoon of Baking Soda, drain and rinse again, and then use the beans in your recipe.
• If all else fails, try Beano.
• If your beans are older, soak beans overnight with 3 cups hot water and 1 tsp Baking Soda per cup of dry beans.
• For quick soak, sort and rinse 1 lb beans, bring to boil in 8 cups water, cover, set aside to soak for 1 hour.
• One cup of dry beans will yield approx 2 ½ cups cooked beans.

Beans freeze really well, can be pressure cooked, and even come canned at the store for cheap (Fry’s even has them on sale right now for 44 cents a can) so there’s no reason not to eat them! I add beans to salads, main dishes to extend them, or even just make a pot of beans and serve with some cheese and bread…simple and easy. My babies all loved canned beans as finger baby food, such a satisfying squishiness.

These are a few recipes that we eat pretty regularly. I just throw pinto beans into a crock pot of water with some garlic and let it cook all day (yes, no soaking. It works). You can do a lot of meals with a pot of beans…I make a big pot on Monday with leftover ham from Sunday dinner, and make several meals for the week all at once.


Navajo Tacos (or serve with chips to make Chalupas)
Cooked pinto beans
Any type of meat, cooked and shredded and seasoned with salsa, cumin and chili powder to taste. (Omit the meat for a vegetarian meal)
Fry Bread (basic bread dough rolled into a circle and fried)
Cheese, sour cream, tomatoes, lettuce/cabbage, onion, etc for the top.

Start with the fry bread, then the beans and meat, and top however you like.





Homemade Refried Beans (for burritos, tacos, huevos rancheros, etc)
Using cooked pinto beans, mash well with a little cooking liquid or water (I use a hand blender sometimes) to the consistency you want. Re heat in a large frying pan adding a bit of milk to the consistency you want, onion powder, salt, etc to taste. Add cheese and stir in if desired.


Aaron’s Awesome Bean Dip
Use your newly homemade refried beans, or a quart size can of refried beans. You could also use the dehydrated refried beans from the cannery.
½ cup or so of salsa
½ tsp garlic powder
½ tsp cumin
½ - 1 cup grated cheese
Milk for consistency.
4-5 squirts of hot sauce, preferably a habanero type.

Stir all together, adding milk for the consistency you want. Its ready when the cheese melts. Serve with chips, etc

Here’s some recipes for the other beans you can get at the cannery:

Ham and Bean Soup
1 bag of Great Northern White Beans, soaked
Leftover Ham bone, or a couple ham hocks
1-2 bay leaves
Water

Cover beans and ham and bay with water and simmer till beans are almost done. (This will be a few hours.) Remove bones and add meat back to pot if desired. Add:

Chopped carrots, onions, celery, potatoes. You know, a couple handfuls each, til it looks right. Season to taste with salt, pepper, parsley, oregano.

Simmer until done and remove bay leaves. This is great to freeze, and it gets better overnight too.

German Black Bean with Sausage Soup

1 bag black beans, soaked overnight
1 large onion
2-3 cloves garlic, chopped
Carrots, Potatoes, Celery
1-2 tsp Cumin
1 tsp Coriander
1 package turkey kielbasa, cooked
1-2 T balsamic vinegar or apple cider vinegar

Simmer the black beans, garlic, sausage and veggies in 2-3 quarts of water until reasonably tender. Add the spices and vinegar to taste and simmer 10-15 minutes longer. The veggies get a little dark-looking if added at the start, so alternatively you can simmer the black beans until tender, saute the chopped veggies in a little olive oil, and add them at the end with the spices. Serve with sour cream, etc. This one freezes well too.


Easy Black Beans
1 pound dried black or turtle beans (or 16-ounce cans black beans, drained)
1 16 ounce jar salsa (your favorite kind)
water
Rinse and soak beans overnight. (Or use quick soak method, or canned beans. Your choice.) Drain the beans and discard the soaking water. Put them in a crock pot with the salsa and stir. Add just enough water to cover the beans. Cover and cook on low all day, 8 to 10 hours. These freeze well.

Here’s some recipes for canned beans (Canned beans are so cheap, it’s a good way to make a meal feed more.):

Easy, Fast Chili
1 lb hamburger (Omit the meat, its good without it too.)
1 small onion
3-5 cans of canned beans…I use a mix, pintos, kidneys, etc. The amount depends on how much you want. Don’t drain!
2 cans chili beans
1 can of tomatoes
1 large can of tomato puree or sauce
2 t cumin
2 t chili powder

Brown hamburger with onion in a large pot. Or you can omit the meat and add dehydrated onions. Add the cans. Add spices, according to your family’s taste…more or less (we like it spicy so I also add salsa and hot sauce). Simmer until hot and serve with sour cream and cheese.

Sloppy Joes with beans
1 lb hamburger
1 small onion
1 can beans (don’t drain if you like it more sloppy)
1 large can tomato sauce
¼ cup ketchup
¼ cup brown sugar
¼ cup BBQ sauce
Brown hamburger with onion. Add remaining ingredients and serve on buns.

[AZ Prepper Lady]

Thanks Rizzo! Beans really are so great. I actually cook with beans a lot but my problem is I never remember to plan ahead and soak overnight. So I end up using canned every time, which is fine except that I'm not using the ones I have in storage. I really need someone to show me how to use my pressure cooker. For some reason I'm scared of it!!

[filibuster]

I read this article http://www.endtimesreport.com/pinto_...0PINTO%20BEANS which mentioned "...noticed that beans were hard to digest, which meant that all of the food value was not being extracted from them. So they added a teaspoon full of wood ashes (lye) to the soaking water for their beans, then rinsed the beans and discarded the soaking water before cooking. The lye altered the state of the lysine in the beans, so the available amino acids were much more readily assimilated by the human digestive tract. It worked: they were healthy."

That led me to some research into using "lye" or alkali water (which includes water with a little baking soda added to it), to soak beans and other seed type foods in to make them healthier.
All seeds have phytates and tannins in them which preserve them and prevent them from easily being digested in fact these properties in a seed will prevent the body in some part from being able to absorb the nutrients present in the seed all together. However, once the seed is soaked either in the ground so it can grow or in a pot of water, the phytates and tannins leach into the water and the seed is freed from the inhibitors and so it grows, and if consumed, nourish the body. Using an alkali water to soak the beans and seeds in, does an even better job of removing those harmful toxins from the seed giving them far more nutritive value than the few vitamins that are lost to the soaking process.

One example of how this process has been lost to most of us, is the problems Europe had with corn when it was introduced to them from the new world after Columbus.

Importance of Preparation
Other major sources of nutrition follow the nutricultural principle. A classic example of the evolution of cuisine practices involves maize or "corn." While maize is the most productive crop in the world, and virtually all of the great Mesoamerican civilizations depended upon it as a staple, it is not nutritionally the best balanced of staples. Maize has low lysine and tryptophan levels, and its niacin levels, when stored as a staple, are nutritionally indigestible. Specifically the B vitamin niacin becomes bound in a complex called niacytin, and this bound form is indigestible to the effects of stomach acid and gastrointestinal enzymes. However, it is known that the chemical bond that makes niacytin resistant to digestive acid is broken in the presence of an alkali that frees the bound niacin. Although humans can make a small amount of niacin from the essential amino acid tryptophan, corn is deficient in tryptophan. Fortunately beans have relatively high levels of tryptophan, and as long as beans are consumed with corn (maize), the diet is balanced. However, if beans and other regular sources of tryptophan or niacin are not available in the diet, the disease pellagra makes people sick with diarrhea, dermatitis, dementia, and ultimately result in death.
While alkali treatment also enhances the solubility of lysine, it is not universally used, even in the Americas where the crop evolved. However, the Native American societies that were high consumers and growers of maize always used alkali in their cuisine technology. It was a one-to-one relationship between high consumers and growers and their subsequent use of this critical step in the preparation of their food staple. In terms of their recipes, the added alkali was prepared in several different ways, including crushed limestone, roasted mollusk shells, and wood ashes. The net effect of this step was always the same. The food was heated and "cooked" in the lime, and then most of the alkali was removed prior to consumption. Even though the recipes varied among different cultures and traditions, these basic cooking steps did not vary.
In this regard it is interesting to note that Christopher Columbus, who first introduced maize to the Old World, only introduced the food and not the critically important recipe. Pellagra became widespread, resulting in a gradual decrease in the use of maize as a human food. Not until the discovery of vitamins beginning in the 1920s, over four hundred years later, was pellagra defined as a nutritional deficiency associated with the consumption of maize.
However, considering the history of every major civilization, it becomes clear that all depended upon the solutions to similar problems to survive and prosper. Thus, while it is possible to innovate new food technologies that may not have many or any negative consequences in times of nutritional abundance, the same practices may produce serious deficiencies during times of nutritional stress. Thus food preparation has substantial survival advantages, and undoubtedly significant wisdom resides in the related food practices that maintain food preparation traditions.
The use of fermentation to enhance the nutrients of wheat and barley in the production of beer and bread is a classic example of how foods become staples of the diet. Fermentation of wheat and barley with yeast not only produces the alcohol in beer and, to a lesser extent, in bread; it also synthesizes nutritionally essential amino acids from nonessential ones, reduces the toxicity of the tannins in the wheat, and lowers the phytate levels that interfere with calcium absorption. Squeezing, crushing, and heating the manioc (a good source of nutrition known throughout the world for yielding the tapioca starch of dessert puddings) reduces the plant's cyanide content, which can be so high that even breathing the cooking fumes can be deadly. With the notable and important exception of fruits, which evolved to attract mammals to eat the seeds and thus to disperse them, the raw produce is not a viable source of nutrients without the culturally evolved capacity for transforming it into an appropriately edible food.

Here are a few other references

As for soaking beans, there appears to be conflicting outcomes. If you want to preserve vitamins you shouldn’t use an alkaline solution (http://www.sciencedirect.com/science...f1d00fc81c425e)
However, if you want to decrease phytates and tannins and other toxic inhibitors for better mineral and protein nutrition you DO need to soak your beans in an alkali solution such as baking soda (http://www.springerlink.com/content/h69154m618312084/)

More on soaking legumes specifically peas, chickpeas, faba and kidney beans: The results obtained indicated that the soaking and extrusion significantly decreased antinutrients such as phytic acid, tannins, phenols, α-amylase and trypsin inhibitors. … The in vitro protein digestibility of legume extrudates was also improved. Therefore, extrusion of legumes a priori soaked in water for 16 hours is recommended to improve the nutritive value of these legumes in order to increase its utilization by human and animal when consumed directly or as an ingredient of certain meals. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S0023-6438(02)00217-7

[Angela]

I also like to grind my dry beans into flour and use the flour in my baking. White beans like Navy beans or Small White beans work best as they don't change the color of your final product and have mild flavor. According to some source somewhere that I don't remember up to 1/4 of any recipe's flour can be substituted with bean flour. I've found personally that if I do the full 1/4 of the flour I can taste the beans in my cookies, but I do put bean flour in bread, cake, cookies, etc. This way my family is eating beans without even realizing it. Sneaky.

[Rizzo]

Angela...how do you grind them? In like a regular old wheat grinder?

[ChefTessBakeresse]

I use a lot of soy flour in my baking same as Angela, but soy. Angela has a really good hand mill though, mine takes forever. Time to invest in one of hers I think. I find this bean post very interesting. The soaking of corn in the lime happens a lot down here in AZ making tamales and tortillas...I've always used baking soda in my soaking water for the beans. Thanks for the great info!! Did you know as a random side note, that longer fermented bread dough is always easier for your body to digest due to similar processes of breaking down the phytates and tannins. Even soaking wheat 24 hours and then grinding it in a meat grinder to form bread dough can make the wheat much easier to digest.

[Angela]

I grind it in my Country Living Mill with the corn/bean auger (yes, lots of exercise), but if you have one of the electric impact type grinders it will make flour out of beans as well as wheat. I used my mom's once--I think it is a whisper mill? Maybe nutrimill? Can't remember. I don't think they'll grind in a stone wheel old style grinder, but I could be wrong.

[ChefTessBakeresse]

I have the whisper mill...and it doesn't do beans. I've never tried lentils though, they may be small enough. I'm just saying the countly living one looks like a good one.

[AZScubaShari]

Thanks Rizzo! Beans really are so great. I actually cook with beans a lot but my problem is I never remember to plan ahead and soak overnight. So I end up using canned every time, which is fine except that I'm not using the ones I have in storage. I really need someone to show me how to use my pressure cooker. For some reason I'm scared of it!!

Christi

Like you I don't remember to soak ahead so I have gotten in the habbit of canning my beans. I pressure can 25lbs of beans at a time then when I want some they are readily available out of the pantry.

Shari