Legumes are one of the most nutritious, inexpensive, and easy things to cook, and knowing how to do it well will save you time and money!
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Cooking Basics | How to cook dry beans and other legumes▼
Hello lovelies that welcome back to the channel I am Christina or a local kitchen witch and today’s video is another in our cooking basics series I just wanted to give a quick casual rundown on various legumes and how to cook them for use in recipes a lot of the recipes I’m going to be sharing in the near future are going to be utilizing seasonal ingredients from my area if you watch my seasonal eating video which I’ll link down below you already know that I try to eat seasonally and I want my videos to reflect that but you also know that I live in a cold climate and it’s wintertime which means using a lot of dry pantry staples like legumes now in my recipes they’re almost always going to be in cooked form so I want you guys to be confident and how to prepare them ahead of time and I think it’s a crying shame that so many people don’t know how to cook legumes and they don’t want to learn because they think they have a have to have a pressure cooker or the whole soaking thing is kind of confusing and I just wanted to spell all of those myths because lentils and beans and all the legumes are one of the most inexpensive most nutritious and easy to repair foods that you can have in your kitchen that’s it’s like pasta easy like cereal easy it promise you you can do this and it doesn’t require any anything special so let’s get into it so as far as our legumes go I like to split them into two categories first we’ve got our long haul guys these are the big whole beans chickpeas garbanzo beans whatever you like to call them pinto beans kidney beans lima beans butter beans black beans anything that is called a bean and isn’t an exact e bean a mung bean or string bean it’s gonna be in this category then we’ve got our little guys this is our mung beans or split mung beans our lentils our split peas they’re the small ones and they take a lot less soaking and cooking time they don’t have to be soaked at all but you still may want to which we’ll get into right now soaking is where well seem to get a little hung up over beans but I’ll let you in on a secret you don’t have to soak any beans ever if you put dry beans in a pot with a lot of water and boil them long enough they will cook and they will be perfectly edible it might take a few hours but they will get soft and cooked the reason why people do like to soak their beans is to make that cooking process a lot shorter it can get a little precarious to have something boiling on your stove for hours and hours and hours I cannot tell you how many pots of beans I have burned because I knew they were going to need to cook for a few hours so I went off to do something didn’t get back in time to add water to the pot and burned beans taste really really bad so you can significantly slash the cook time and risk by fully rehydrating the beans first I can’t tell you exactly how long any of these are going to take to cook specifically especially because age plays such a big role the older a bean gets the longer it takes to cook even after fully rehydrating but I can tell you from experience that a fully rehydrated bean that’s been soaked overnight usually takes less than half the time to cook that just a dry bean and boiling water does which saves time the possibility for burning and electricity so let’s talk about how long you should soak here I have a bowl of pinto beans that I soaked overnight a bowl that has been soaking for one hour and dry for comparison and I have the same with split peas as you can see the pinto beans that were soaked overnight are much larger than the ones that are soaked for an hour and they’re both significantly larger than the dry but if we look over at our split peas the ones that soaked overnight are pretty much the same size as the ones that were so much for an hour and they’re both significantly larger than the dry this is pretty self-explanatory but larger beans take longer to fully rehydrate and small legumes like lentils or split peas are fully rehydrated within an hour too so they really don’t benefit from soaking any longer however they aren’t really hurt by it either so if it’s easier for you to start your lentils or split peas the night before like I usually do then as far as I’m aware that doesn’t really make much of a difference on the flip side if you wake up one morning and you just really want to make chili for dinner but you didn’t start soaking any kidney beans or pinto beans the night before you can still start soaking them then a few hours of soaking might not get them fully rehydrated but it’ll still help cut down on the cook time I’ve also heard that soaking beans can help reduce their gas enos and make them easier to digest I don’t know if that’s true at all but the convenience of soaking completely makes it worth it for me to do regardless so with all of that in mind let’s cook some beans all right in our larger pot we have our pinto beans and the smaller one we’re doing the split peas split peas and lentils and other small legumes from our second category a lot of times aren’t going to need to be precooked for your recipes the recipe itself will have cooking instructions in them but it’s still good to know just in case it’s asking for precooked because kanda lentils are not easy to find and I apologize for any background noise my cat is like insane right now so it’s just gonna happen it can already crashing or burning the first thing we want to do is salt the water very very very well you want it about as salty as the ocean like they would say for pasta water or for a different reference if you know you’re not regularly tasting the ocean you want it as salty as you’d want it to be if it was a soup or a broth and not just water and literally taste the water they never do that when cooking shows or anything because chefs are really good at eyeballing it and they you know you can always add salt later but with beans I think it’s especially important to have it very well salted because you know you could just throw these in and boil them and it would be fine they’d be edible but if you eat a fully cooked bean that it’s 100% plain and unsalted it’s gonna be pretty gross and we’re being ominous the one thing you never ever ever want to forget to do is salt the water there’s also going to be some sizzling background noise and you’re just gonna have to deal with that but another thing I wanted to note with split peas especially but all legumes oftentimes when you’re soaking them when you’re rinsing them when you’re pouring water into the pot you will notice foam or really cloudy water things like that all of that is just impurities from the farm from the processing processes and you just want to keep rinsing it until you get like clean looking water adding salt to the water doesn’t necessarily change the way it cooks but it definitely changes the flavor of the bean itself and not just on the outside like all the way through beans are flavor sponges all the views are flavor sponges there’s a reason why soy beans are famous for tasting like other things and so you know if you want them to just not be gross you can add salt and that’s great you absolutely should 100% do that but you want to take it a step further and actually make whatever legumes you’re cooking delicious you should add some other things some aromatic herbs some spices some fats that would complement whatever they’re intended for to this pot I am going to be adding a few different things because these beans I know are going to end up being in burritos so I’m gonna be adding some dried chilies garlic onions and spices and some pork fat never throw away excess fat when you are trimming needs or whatever keep the fat it freezes really well and it’s free flavor then with the split peas I’m really not sure doing with them yet I’m just making them for kind of a generic meal prep so I’m just adding onions garlic salt and maybe some other spices that I use very frequently [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] alright all of our ingredients are in I’m going to bring both of these pots to really strong boil then turn down the heat slightly so that we just get a vigorous simmer and then we are gonna let them go until they are tender alright folks we are back it’s been about 45 minutes the split peas were finished cooking just under the 20-minute mark and split peas can be a little bit tricky they can take anywhere from like 1213 minutes to cook all the way up until 30 so you really want to keep an eye on them because mush isn’t good you’ll know that they’re done perfectly when you can stir them around and they’re not mushing they’re not disintegrating they’re holding their shape but when you bite down or apply some pressure they just turn absolutely creamy and tender and delicious he’s taste fantastic and there’s a little bit of a trick that I like to use when I’m cooking things that don’t take quite as long instead of adding water continually so that they’re fully submerged I fill the pot initially with about an inch of water above the split peas and I do this with lentils and stuff as well and then I just let it cook down and let the water evaporate and that steam finishes up the cooking process there’s still a little bit of liquid in here but it’s somewhat similar to how I would cook rice I think it makes it a little bit easier and a little bit safer to not overcook this way but if you’re more comfortable with just adding water and keeping them submerged that’s totally fine as well over here we have our pinto beans it’s a slightly different method of these are finished cooking because these have skins on them which gives you a little bit of leeway a little bit of safety which is nice the skin may start to split if it goes through a big temperature change if you blow on it and cool it down very quickly but overall the skins are fully intact however when you mush it or apply some pressure by it down it’s completely creamy on the inside it’s almost like it’s almost like garlicky mashed potatoes on the inside it’s delicious beans and legumes do not have to be black and with just a little bit of extra effort and a little bit of a little bit of extra cost from some other ingredients you can take beans and lentils and all your glooms from something you wouldn’t really want to eat to something you actually crave and I think that’s fantastic I’m going to let both of these cool completely and then I’m going to transfer them into storage containers for use and meal prep throughout the week and I’m going to store them in the cooking liquid itself if it’s packed full of flavor I don’t want to waste it I don’t want to just throw it away and once they are cooled down and cold in the fridge they’re not going to continue to absorb any of that water do you don’t have to worry about them getting mushy anyway I hope you learned something I hope you are no longer intimidated by beans if you were before and if you have any questions or comments or suggestions for future videos please leave those down below thank you so much for watching and I will see you in the next video.
Legumes are one of the most nutritious, inexpensive, and easy things to cook
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