BEAN YEAR

Hello! I hope everyone has enjoyed bean box 1. Over the next week leading up to Bean Box 2 I will release snippets of the first Bean Letter

Enjoy!

Brian

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Welcome to BEAN YEAR BOX 1 BEAN LETTER

Cicer & Phaseolus vulgaris

Restrictive New Year’s resolutions never sat well with me. A few years ago a friend told me they do permissive resolutions, saying “yes” to new experiences instead of “no”. With my interest in plants I decided to use this idea as a way to explore a plant family: Fabaceae.

The rule was simple: when offered something in the Fabaceae family I said “yes”. I read books about beans. I ordered beans at food carts and restaurants. I made bean memes. I sought out as wide a breadth of genuses and ways of preparation as I could. Even trying some poisonous beans. Here I hope to curate what I found and learned, but really anyone can have their own “bean year”, you just have to say “yes” to beans. 

You can read the Wikipedia pages for these beans as well as I can. I am not intending these to be a compleat review of the history and use of each bean-family plant we sample. 

It is easy to find people talking on the internet. Look up any of these beans and there’s a large and growing number of pages that will run off the histories, types, cooking suggestions for them. 

But what is important, what is always important, is actually experiencing something. Knowledge gained through experience can never be explained. If a picture is worth a thousand words, then eating the picture is worth probably a million words.

I can, however, talk about how food scientists and cooks tasteand eat. In this project we are more interested in understanding the full breadth of experience of beans in order to calibrate our senses, than whether we simply like or dislike this or that bean. 

There is an incredible interplay between our sense of smell and taste. Take a pause to smell the food you’ve cooked first. Often beans are cooked for a long time, so the smell creeps up slowly. Then when we sit down with our bowl or plate, breath in while taking the first bite. Then, take a note of the texture of the cooked beans, eat some earlier in the cooking process to see how they change during cooking. 

At this point, we are not eating this to like or dislike it, but to *taste*. Describe the flavors. Is is salty? Rich? Is there a bitterness? Have you used onions or spices you can taste? Does it taste similar to other dishes you’ve had? And importantly since we’re tasting these as a coherent training: 

Does the cooked black chickpea taste similar to the roasted salted chickpea? 

Does the pinto bean taste similar to the Anasazi bean? 

On cooking beans

Go read the Serious Eats article by Daniel Gritzer “How to Cook Dried Beans”. I absolutely cannot do a better a job than that. I will add that the beans I source, as best as I can, are from the most recent crop year, 2024. I aim to provide freshly dried beans. 

Here’s the big take aways: 
-Soak these beans. Yes they’re fresh but it doesn’t hurt to soak. 

-Salt the water, even the soaking water if you want. 

– 1 cup of dried beans yields around 3 cups cooked beans

A note on bean broth: it’s amazing. Enjoy it. Savor it.