How to Cook Dried Beans - The Right Way - For Maximum Nutrition

so you put a bag of dried beans now what well today I want to share with you the best way to cook these beans to maximize their nutritional value so that we can best absorb their nutrients plus I'll show you how to make them very tender and tasty hi sweet friends I'm Mary and welcome to Mary's nest where I teach traditional cooking skills for making nutrient-dense foods like bone broth ferments sourdough and more so if you enjoy learning about those things consider subscribing to my channel and don't forget to click on the little notification bell below that'll let you know every time I upload a new video dried beans should be a staple in everyone's pantry they're wonderful to have on hand plus they are a lot less expensive than canned beans and although yes they do need to be soaked there's really very little work on your part today I'm gonna be preparing pinto beans but you can use any dried bean that you like you can have navy beans you can have cannellini beans kidney beans black beans the rules are the same now this is a four pound bag of pinto beans but I'm just going to cook a pound and a pound of beans really any bean that you may be working with is going to be about two cups now the first thing that you want to do is just scoop out your first cup of beans and get some type of colander or mesh strainer whatever you have and if you don't have either of those you can just go ahead and put these in a bowl what we want to do is give them a good rinsing to get rid of any dust or dirt that may be on them and then just feel around to make sure that there are no little stones or pebbles mixed in so you're just gonna take them over to the sink give them a good rinse which is exactly what I've done with these they're still wet that's fine and I'm just kind of looking through seeing if there's any beans that look a little funny maybe a little off in color or if I see any little pebble I'll get that out now and that's all that you want to do at that point next you want to get a nice large pot and you want to transfer your beans into the pot next for every pound of beans you have the two cups you want ten cups of water and I like to just use a nice room-temperature water not cold not hot now this was an 8 cup measuring cup but I had it filled right to the rim so that's just about 10 cups now I'm going to show you I'm gonna take a picture so you can see that some of the beans will float to the top now I'll overlay a little video it may be a little difficult for you to see but I have two beans that have floated to the top and are just kind of floating around here and I'm gonna remove those I always feel maybe they're a little something wrong with them but there were just two that we're floating to the top and so I'm gonna take those out and discard them now I'm not going to add anything else to soak these beans other than the plain room-temperature water some people will recommend adding a little bit of baking soda but there's some evidence now that the baking soda may actually leach out the B vitamins from the beans making them less nutritious for us so now scientists are often recommending that we leave out the baking soda now the real hard work we're gonna cover them and let them soak but in all seriousness this is the easy part but now how long to soak the beans at a minimum I like to soak beans for at least 24 hours so I like to start them the night before the night I plan on cooking them for dinner and the reason is beans contain compounds that can not only make them difficult to digest by humans can also impede our ability to absorb the nutrients from beans as well as potentially strip other nutrients from our body and we don't want that to happen some of these compounds are known as phytic acid and you may have heard me discuss this in the past in other videos when I've spoken about grains and beans but the soaking process activates a compound known as phytase and phytase helps decrease the phytic acid and the longer you soak the beans the more able you are to decrease that phytic acid so if you can soak these beans for 24 hours you will help decrease a lot of that phytic acid thereby making the nutrients in the beans more available to be absorbed by your stomach now if you can only soak them for 12 hours 12 hours is better than nothing but if you can go over those 24 hours all the better and if you're feeling incredibly industrious soaking beans for 48 hours is the ideal time now if you soak your beans for 48 hours you will significantly decrease the phytic acid but if you decide to do that at the 24 hour mark drain the beans rinse them and put fresh put fresh water into your pot with your beans and let them soak the next 24 hours but if you're new to cooking dried beans and cooking them this way and you just want to soak them for 12 hours or 24 hours and not go to the whole 48 hours that's fine it's a good place to start especially if you're in the process of making the transition from a processed foods kitchen where you may be buying the canned beans and you're on your journey to a traditional foods kitchen this is a great place to start well I'm just gonna let these soak overnight now and we'll come back tomorrow mid late afternoon early evening and I'll show you the best way to cook these beans now all those beans are soaking there's one important thing that I want to share with you if you want to take this whole process one step further you can sprout your beans sprouting beans will further reduce the phytic acid in them and make the nutrients in the B even more absorbable and once you've sprout your beans you go on to cook them the same way that we're gonna cook these tomorrow now I have another video it's very detailed and I show you how to go through the process of soaking and sprouting beans but like soaking them going on to sprout them really has very little work on our part it's really just a matter of time so if you're feeling adventurous and you want to try your hand at sprouting your beans I'll be sure to link to that video in the I cards above and in the description below well it's late afternoon or the next day and these beans have been soaking for 24 hours now and I'm going to overlay a picture and you'll see that there's just like a little foam that comes to the top and there's a few bean skins that have come off and are floating on the top I'm going to remove those but the first thing that we're gonna do is we're gonna go ahead and we're gonna give these a good rinse well I drained off all the water gave these beans or good rinse and now I'm going to put them back in the pot we'll get ready to get them and now remember we have one pound of the beans which are approximately two cups so we need 10 cups of water and that's about what I have in here so we'll just go ahead and pour that in and this is just plain room-temperature water now we're gonna put these on the stovetop and we're gonna bring them up to a simmer just a medium simmer you don't want to boil your beans and we're not gonna add anything in no salt no seasoning we want to cook them just in the plain water they're gonna cook the best this way the fastest this way and they're going to be the most tender this way so once they come up to a medium simmer we'll just put the lid on and we'll let them cook for 30 minutes depending on what type of being you're cooking it may take anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour or longer to cook thoroughly but it's best to start checking them at 30 minutes and you're just looking for a nice tender bean you don't want it to be mushy you don't want them falling apart nothing like that just tender but don't worry they you're not adding any salt or seasoning at this point they're going to be very flavorful because once they're cooked I'm going to show you how to flavor them so that the flavor will really penetrate the beans and you're gonna have a very tasty bean well I've got those beans over on my stovetop on a medium simmer and I've taken a little video that I'll overlay this is primarily for the new cook who is cooking dried beans for the first time so that you can see what I mean when I use the terminology medium simmer you definitely don't want to boil the beans you just want a nice little bit of bubbling and that will cook them perfectly if you boil them the skins can come off they can become mushy and so on and so forth it's just so problematic but that medium simmer is perfect as your as it comes up to a medium simmer that you'll be able to see in the video that I overlaid there will be some foam that'll come to the top it's really nothing to worry about if you want you can skim that off but it's really not necessary now earlier in the video I sent a lot of time talking to you about the downside of phytic acid but frankic acid actually has a good side scientists have discovered that phytic acid is an antioxidant and so it plays a role in disease prevention I found this fascinating so the fact that we are able to decrease some of the phytic acid through soaking the beans is a good thing because we want to be able to digest them and absorb the nutrients but the fact that we can't really do Veit so to speak all the phytic acid is not a bad thing it may actually be a good thing because we get the best of both worlds we digest the beans we absorb the nutrients and we get the antioxidant antioxidant benefits of the phytic acid so it's a very interesting topic and I highly recommend that you do some research on it because much of it is related to our ancestral background our genetics and what agrees with us and how we should eat and I think that you'll find it very interesting I discussed this more in another video which I'll be sure to link to in the I cards in the description below if you'd like to learn more well my pinto beans have cooked beautifully I check them at about 30 minutes and they just needed a few more minutes so I let them go maybe 3540 minutes they're intact and they're beautifully tender and I'm gonna overlay a close-up picture so that you can see them nice and close-up and this is exactly what you're looking for intact with their skins on now I'm going to take a video and overlay it so you can see this up close but what you're looking for is that the bean has a little bit of resistance so it still got some body to it so to speak that it's not mushy yet you can break it easily with your fork that's exactly what you're looking for and then take a taste see if it agrees with you see if you like the texture in your mouth and you'll know that your beans are done perfectly now I want to give you a tip so that you have perfectly seasoned beans what do you want to do at this point is leave them sitting in their cooking water and add your seasonings now so what I like to do for one pound of beans is add a tablespoon of salt and this is just a fine ground sea salt and I'm just gonna go ahead and sprinkle that right into the cooking water with the beans still in there and I'm gonna get a spatula and give it a little stir so I'm just gonna stir that around a little just to help that salt dissolve and then at this point you can also add anything else that you want any herbs spices a bay leaf anything that you like and then you're just gonna let them sit in this hot water for a few minutes to allow them to absorb some of that flavoring so after you've let them sit in the seasoned water for a little bit and don't worry you can let them sit in that seasoned water up to 30 minutes it's going to be cooling off and your beans are going to be fine they're not going to get overcooked so after they've sat in this seasoned water for a little bit we're going to drain them and I'll show you your perfectly cooked beans we'll look at these glorious beans perfectly cooked and ready to you in any recipe that you want if you want to put them in soup they're already cooked you just put them in at the last minute to just warm through it'll be wonderful you can use them in nachos you can put some on top of salads you can just toss them with some olive oil and vinegar maybe a little oregano they'll be wonderful they'll stay fresh in your fridge for a number of days and you can also freeze them and they'll stay fresh in your freezer for about two to three months well I let these soak in the salted water for about five minutes or so so let's give them a taste and see how well they absorb that brine mmm perfect delicious well these beans are delicious they're perfectly seasoned now if you would like to serve beans on toast and you want to learn how to make your own bread be sure to click on this video over here I show you how to make homemade bread with yeast without yeast with sourdough starter a whole variety of different types of breads and I'll see you over there in my Texas Hill Country kitchen love and God bless

Channel: Mary's Nest

Views: 562,421

Rating: 4.8841963 out of 5

Keywords: How to cook dried beans, how to cook dried beans the right way, how to cook dried beans for maximum nutrition, how to cook beans, dried beans, how to soak beans, how to soak beans overnight, how to soak beans before cooking, how to soak beans fast, how soak dried beans, beans, cooking dried beans, soak beans, how to soak dried beans, cook beans, soaking dried beans, how to rehydrate dried beans, soaking beans, Cooking dry beans, marysnest, marys nest

Id: cTEfvrg0rd4

Length: 14min 23sec (863 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 05 2020