Putting Up Dry Beans

 As I have mentioned before, beans store best in an oxygen-free environment. Buying beans in bulk may work well to hold down costs.

But they obviously can't be stored in the bag for the amount of time it will take most people to go through them, and storing them in a bucket or tub will still allow them to age while they're being slowly used up. Packing them in mylar is fine, but once they're opened, they will start to age again--and they may have aged while in storage.

Therefore, when I buy a big bag, I pack it in five-pound increments.  Five pounds is about right for a gallon-sized mylar bag.

Some mylar bags have a zip lock, but all can be sealed with a heat source (and it makes sense to seal them on top of zipping them, too).  I use a curling iron (it has to be set on high to adequately melt the mylar for a seal).

A five-gallon bucket will hold about four five-pound bags of beans (maybe five with a little bit of work).  A bucket provides extra protection against pests and damage to the mylar bags while they're in storage (although mice can get through a bucket wall--nothing short of a metal can is truly pest-proof).

 

I don't know how long beans will keep in mylar.  I don't plan to hang onto them for too long before opening them up, but as I've mentioned previously, researchers have found that they seem to keep for up to 32 years and possibly longer.  With rotation, it should be possible to keep the storage time well under that in most circumstances.

 

Oxygen Absorbers

 As noted previously, sometimes bad things happen with stored food over time.  Food in a sealed container that has oxygen in it, as well, can suffer from infestation and oxidation / deterioration. Freezer burn is another example of this.  So it is best when storing things for more than a short time to vacate the oxygen.

Food Saver-style vacuum sealers do this, and there are also jar attachments for wide mouth and regular mouth canning jars.  I don't know offhand what concentration of oxygen they can reduce the interior of a jar to, but they're a decent approach. They may not drop it enough to prevent insect eggs from hatching.

Another approach is to use oxygen absorbers. They are sold in various sizes to accommodate different containers.  US Emergency Supply has a very useful chart on this. In addition to canning jars, mylar bags and buckets can be used (the bags do not need to be kept in a bucket, but a bucket needs a bag in order to store food--BYU researchers found that oxygen levels could not be reliably maintained at a low enough level using a bucket alone, probably because of seal leakage).

There are plenty of resources online showing the use of mylar bags.  In addition to oxygen absorbers, dry ice can be used to drive out the oxygen.  That's a more old-school approach that fills the container with CO2 rather than sucking the oxygen out of the air and into the iron powder in the absorber.  The Rose Red Homestead has a video that demonstrates both approaches.

When exposed to air, oxygen absorbers begin to react.  It does not necessarily happen very fast, but it does happen: so opening a package of them doesn't render them all useless within two minutes unless sealed back up, but they do need to be put in either their final destination or in another airtight container quickly (a canning jar that is then vacuum-sealed is ideal).

Some oxygen absorber packages have an oxygen indicator:

The Oxyeye is pink when it hasn't been exposed to oxygen, and it soon turns purple after opening the package (or after the package leaks and allows the concentration inside to exceed 0.05%).

One caveat is that in time, the indicator will turn a faded pink, looking almost like it did when unexposed:

The above indicator is a few months old; I just clipped it to the refrigerator to see what would happen.

A usable oxygen indicator will feel like a pillow stuffed with powder, which it is when it's in its unexposed state. If it feels rigid and crumbly, it's probably no longer able to absorb oxygen.  Some vendors repackage absorbers into smaller quantities.  The repackaged absorbers are quite likely to be at least partially depleted in this process, and may be completely ruined. While some oxygen reduction is better than none, levels have to drop below one percent to prevent insect eggs from hatching.  With functioning absorbers and mylar bags, this is achievable.

The above picture shows some pinto beans, packed into gallon-sized mylar bags (five pounds in each). After a day, a noticeable vacuum effect has sucked the package down around the contents as the oxygen has been removed.

After my infestation episode, I'm trying to put my wheat into mylar, even though wheat doesn't necessarily need oxygen-free storage for quality purposes over a relatively short time frame. Hopefully the day of weevils will not be repeated.

More on Old Beans

 A few years ago I discussed ways to deal with old pinto beans (and other dry beans).  I mentioned that pressure cooking them for 15 minutes seemed to work (the manual for my cooker suggests 3-6 minutes for pinto beans, so 15 is a substantial increase in cooking time).  I had some more very old beans (vintage 2011, not stored in an oxygen-free environment) in the pantry that I decided to try to prepare.

A new pinto bean is at the top for comparison.  When I soaked the beans overnight, they did swell substantially, so that was a good sign.  I poured off the water and pressure cooked them together with granulated garlic, dried minced onion, and some salt pork (rather than bacon, of which I did not have any thawed).  This was the result:

They're still quite dark, and hadn't absorbed as much of the cooking water as anticipated (compare to the results from a previous effort):

This time, the beans were also a bit al dente. Longer cooking time may have helped.  Possibly 20 minutes?  Aside from the firmness, they tasted fine.  The nutritional content might have been lacking in some categories.

I don't really have much information on beans stored in a light- and oxygen-free container.  They are probably better.  Cyrus Larson, et al. at  BYU tested vacuum-packed dry beans aged up to 32 years and found that they were at least edible.

Canning Dry Beans

I've posted before about cooking dry beans (primarily pinto, but my favorite is cranberry).  Beans keep a long time when dry, but they eventually become difficult to cook; the solution that has worked best for me is pressure cooking.

Another alternative is to can them.  Now that I'm using my pressure canner, that is an option.  Canning beans offers no advantage over storing dry with the exception that they are ready to eat without further preparation.  Canned beans certainly won't last longer than dry beans in terms of storage life (the latter are good for 30 years, if "dislike slightly" is good enough).

There are numerous sites that describe canning beans, but one thing is striking: most describe canning plain beans.  The NCHFP does have a recipe for canning beans with tomato or molasses sauce that optionally includes adding a small amount of bacon or pork.  As I've noted previously, when making a pot of beans for immediate use (or for freezing) I add onion, garlic, and bacon to the mix.

I decided to give my normal recipe a try.  The amount of bacon per jar would be comparable to that suggested by the NCHFP site, although my precise recipe isn't listed--the one featuring the bacon includes tomato or molasses, which is not the flavor I was going for at all (I cut up a pound of bacon for the batch, which worked out to about one ounce per jar--somewhat more than the 3/4 inch cube in the NCHFP recipe).

The NCHFP site recommends an overnight or quick soak, followed by 30 minutes' worth of boiling before putting in the jars.  The extra boiling might be justified if it helps the beans absorb more water so that they are fully hydrated.  But that level of cooking obviously isn't needed for tenderness: the beans process for 75-90 minutes at 240 degrees.  That cooks them very well.

I soaked three pounds of cranberry beans overnight, then poured off the water and added the onion, garlic, and bacon, placing them straight into the jars--similar to the process suggested by The Prairie Homestead.

I had some fresh onion, but not enough for the whole batch, so I hydrated some dried minced onion, following the process previously described.  Then it was just a matter of filling the jars, first with beans, then with water, to about the 1" of headspace line.

The NCHFP suggests 5 pounds of beans for 7 quarts (or 14 pints); The Prairie Homestead got more than 1 pound in each quart jar.  But these recipes don't include the onion or bacon.  I ended up with about 17 pints' worth of bean mix.  This was somewhat unfortunate, because my All American 921 canner cannot hold that many widemouth jars (various sites indicate the capacity is 19 pints, but that is based on standard-mouth jars, which are narrower--relatively few sites break the capacity down by different jar types, but those that do suggest the max capacity with widemouths is 16 pints).  In the picture, you'll see that I had one standard-mouth jar.  As I kept filling and filling and filling...I realized I was going to need all the space I had and then some.  Unfortunately, I could only find one empty standard-mouth jar.  I mostly use widemouths, though I have a number of standard-mouth jars--they were just all full of peach and blueberry preserves.   I was only able to get 15 jars into the canner, 7 below and 8 on top.

I processed them for about 80 minutes at 10 pounds.  When they came out of the canner, it was obvious they'd leaked a little, but not much: the water in the bottom of the canner looked (very) slightly cloudy and the jars had some fat-slickness to them.

After they cooled down, the liquid level inside the jars did recede quite a bit--In this case, I don't think it was all leakage, because all of the jars were low and there was nowhere near that amount in the bottom of the canner.  I think the fluid level dropped simply due to it being absorbed by the beans.  Although some of the beans appear to be high and dry in the picture, they are still tender (and cooked to perfection).

I'll probably still mostly cook beans for immediate use going forward, occasionally freezing one or two meals' worth.  However, canning does expand the opportunity to use them. Cooking a batch of beans is a big endeavor, and I don't always have the time when I would otherwise eat some.  Now I have them if I want them.  One pint is about the right quantity for one meal.

More on the Storage Life of Dehydrated Refried Beans

I noted a couple of years ago that I had some cans of dehydrated refried beans that were put up in February, 2009.  I am down to just one can left, but recently opened the next to last one.  It was fine.  If there has been any deterioration in quality, I can't detect it.  As I mentioned before and elsewhere, my house routinely hits 80 and higher in the summer (though usually not warmer than 83), so the storage conditions have definitely not been completely ideal.  Even so, they were okay.  Since I'm now about out, it's time for more.

The same things I noted previously still apply: they're a bit saltier than some brands of ready-to-use refried beans; also, I don't follow the process on the label above (1 1/2 cups of dry flakes with 1 cup of boiling water, stir and let sit for 10 minutes).  I make up smaller quantities for the microwave using an ad hoc amount of water, so I get inconsistent results.  Maybe the label directions would work better.  That notwithstanding, if they are a little too thin, letting them stand for a few minutes does thicken them up.  Continuing to heat them in a microwave does, too, but they start to crackle as they get heated further.

I generally use them for burritos, but even in a bowl eaten straight up they're fine.

Dehydrated Refried Beans Shelf Life

Dehydrated refried beans are not believed to have a very long storage life.  Some sites suggest they may last as long as 15-20 or  25 years, but other suggest as little as 5 years.  It makes sense that refried beans, which have been cooked then dried, would not last as long as intact beans, which are estimated to last about 30 years.

I have a case of dehydrated refried beans that I have been meaning to rotate, but I haven't gotten around to it.  One #10 can, once opened, lasts a long time.  I finally decided to haul one out and see how it was holding up.  It was canned in February, 2009, so eight years ago.

It's fine.  There's no detectable loss in quality.  This despite the fact that my house gets warm in the summer, as I have noted before, up to the low 80s during the day.  So my conditions are far from ideal.

I'm still going to work on rotating them.  If I use up all six cans and replace them with more I'll be eating a lot of beans.  But I fully expect that what I have will be good for a few more years (or more).

Dehydrated refried beans have a few issues.  Although good dry (someone recommended adding them to salads like bacon bits...an intriguing concept), more conventionally they will be rehydrated.  They're rather salty, at least to my palate, but as I have noted before, I don't use a lot of salt on my own and may be unduly sensitive.  The saltiness is more apparent when they are hydrated than when they are dry.

They're good: They're largely fat free and can be had fairly cheaply.  They last longer and are less costly than normal refried beans (by far, actually: some brands of refried beans cost $1.00 or even more for a single one-pound can vs. $12 or less for the equivalent of about 20-30 cans' worth [depending on brand]).  Worth a look...

Still More on Pinto Beans

As I have noted before, my recipe for beans is very easy, has wide tolerances, and usually produces good results.  Variations are possible; fresh onion and garlic can be swapped out for their dehydrated counterparts, and there are substitutions for the bacon, too--turkey bacon works okay, although not great, and even veggie pseudo bacon will produce serviceable results.  The person who taught me how to do beans long ago used fat back.

I mentioned in the previous posts that I had some bad experiences with old beans cooked at normal pressure in a covered pot.  Al dente beans are not that good.  They also had a bitter aftertaste. Extra garlic and bacon help with impaired beans, even when pressure cooked.  However...

...In addition to old beans, I made a pot a couple of months ago with old bacon.  I had frozen it and lost track of it in the freezer; when I found it I decided to give it a try. I don't think it was bad, necessarily, but it had aged to the point that it smelled off.  It did not improve when boiled with everything else.  I ended up throwing most of that pot out, alas.

My most recent pot went fine.  A win after a flop is helpful.  One bad culinary experience can imprint a memory that lasts for years (or more).  After I tried to use an excess of barbecue sauce to make a cooked jackrabbit edible (it didn't work), I had a negative association with barbecue sauce for a long time.  Foodborne illness after a mall food court gyro made me leave that food item behind forever.  So I don't want to have a string of failures with beans, one of my favorite dishes.

This pot was the basic two onions, about five mostly big garlic cloves, and six ounces of bacon.  Pressure cooked for 12 minutes, and it took about 23 minutes for the pressure to drop after removing from the heat so I could eat them.  Total time from starting prep to being ready to serve was about an hour and fifteen minutes.  I was using cranberry beans this time.  I'll do some pintos soon.

More on Beans

I made another pot of beans with the pressure cooker last night, as discussed previously, but after soaking the beans I discovered I didn't have any onions--which was a problem.  I have never made beans without fresh onion, but I decided to give dried minced onion a try.  I had some of that in the pantry.

Normally I put in two onions, but the amount in two onions varies.  It's probably usually about two to three cups of diced onion.  Usually, dried vegetables and herbs seem to rehydrate to about a 3:1 ratio; one teaspoon dried equals about one tablespoon fresh.  So I tossed in 3/4 cups of minced onion.  I also added more water.  Normally I put the water level right at the top of the beans (sometimes slightly more if cooking in a non-pressurized pot), but I added quite a bit more because I knew the dehydrated onion would absorb water, rather than increase the water level as fresh onions do when they cook down.

In the end, I put a bit too much extra water in.  Another alternative would've been to rehydrate them before adding to the pot, but that seems to be unnecessary.  The picture at right shows the pot after I had scooped out a generous portion for dinner.  The flavor was okay. A whole cup would have worked, too, but the results with 3/4 cup were fine. I wouldn't mind doing them this way again (and probably will; I have more minced onion that I haven't been using much of and I need to learn to use it for more than marinade). Minced onion keeps for a long time if properly packaged.

I could also substitute dehydrated / minced garlic, though I have no experience with it.  The only dry form I have used is powdered.  The bacon would be another problem.  It's an important component in the recipe and I'm not immediately aware of non-fresh or frozen alternatives.  I do know about canned bacon, but that's already cooked and might not work very well.  I may try it sometime just to see how it goes.  This time, by the way, I used thick-cut bacon, which was much easier to slice into small pieces than normal thin-cut bacon is.  I dropped it back down to four ounces, and that was fine (both in terms of flavoring and deterring foaming).

For the record:  It took 25 minutes after the cooking time ended for the pressure to drop in the cooker.  The guidelines for beans in the manual say the pressure should drop on its own rather than via venting.

Lastly, I ran across a site that has nutritional information for generally wholesome foods; pintos are on their list:  World's Healthiest Foods-Pinto Beans.

Beans (and Dealing with Old Beans)

I love beans. I have grown Kentucky Wonder pole beans and bush pinto and cranberry beans (I have also planted cranberry beans from the store; as far as I know there are no hybrids [ditto for store-bought pintos]).  This post is about cooking with pintos and cranberry beans.  I like cranberry beans more--they're somewhat sweeter--but both are good. I'm not a real fan of kidney beans, black beans, or others--at least when i cook them myself.  I do have some Anasazi beans; they turn out okay.

Until very recently, my procedure was invariably this:  soak one pound of beans for at least six hours.  Before soaking, the beans have to be sorted through fairly carefully.  There are usually a number of bad beans in the bag, and there will often be some small dirt clods and rocks.  The beans themselves grow in pods above ground level (unlike peanuts), but modern harvesting methods make it pretty easy for foreign objects to get into the finished product (however, in a one-pound tranche of dry beans, you probably will not find more than a couple of rocks). After soaking, some sites recommend draining then rinsing, to limit gas byproducts of bean consumption.  Other sites say that doesn't help much.  Even if it helps some, it probably won't eliminate the problem: Beano and similar products can help with that.

After soaking, set the level of the water at just barely above the soaked beans; add two diced onions, a few cloves of garlic (4-6 usually, sometimes 10 depending on size), and bacon (4 ounces); then cook covered on low heat for about 90 minutes. When I lived in Denver at higher altitude, they had to be cooked for about two hours.  At that point, check for tenderness; if the beans are done, cook on slightly higher heat with the lid off for another 10-20 minutes or so--this will cause the beans to cook out some excess water (if there is any, which there usually is), and allow them to skin over a little.  The final result is usually really good.  I've been cooking them this way for a very long time.


The last few pots, I've switched to a pressure cooker. A friend in Denver suggested I do that long ago, but I never did until recently.  I stuck with the tried and true method above.  For pressure cooking, the procedures are similar, but the cooking time is less. I adjust the water level to just below the soaked beans (the onions release a lot of water while cooking and I don't cook them down like I do with the open pot). I upped the bacon to six ounces because the pressure cooker manual said a teaspoon of cooking oil should be added to cut down on the amount of foaming during cooking.  I figured the extra bacon would add enough fat.  So far, I do not seem to have any foaming issues, but I don't put much into the vessel (one pound of beans into an eight-quart cooker).  The manual says six minutes at pressure, but I cook them for 12 and the results are good.

It takes me about a half hour to cut everything up and add it to the pot--I'm not that fast--and then pressure cooking time is about 45 minutes overall: it takes a while to heat up to pressure, then still longer for the pressure to drop after the 12 minutes.  That's still substantially faster than cooking in a non-pressurized pot, and heats the house up less (a plus in summer).

Why'd I get a pressure cooker?  Trouble with old pintos.  I bought a 10-pound bag of pinto beans, and had a few that didn't get cooked for a couple of years.  They looked fairly old soon after I got them and looked worse when I finally tried cooking the last few pounds (old pintos turn dark brown).

Utah State University has guidelines on softening old beans.  Cooking the normal way didn't work.  Even after two hours, they didn't soften and tasted pretty gross.  The first attempt was just about the worst pot of beans I've ever made.

I then tried one of the suggestions--adding baking soda to the cooking water.  Didn't work.  Another suggestion was to freeze the beans after cooking.  That helped a little one time, but failed another.  Maybe freezing after soaking, before cooking might help.  I didn't try that.  Finally, I decided to get a pressure cooker.  I cooked the first load for 15 minutes and it worked--at least it made them tender.  The taste wasn't 100%, but they were ok.

Why go through so much trouble? After all, they cost less than a dollar a pound.  But sooner or later, I'll have more old beans to deal with.  So I was motivated to find a way to make them work.  As a byproduct, I have now implemented a way to cook even fresh(er) beans that's quicker and somewhat easier.

Above I mentioned that they usually turn out well.  That's not quite right.  Usually, they turn out heavenly.  It's probably a little weird to be so euphoric about beans, but for whatever reason, they are just about my favorite dish.  One pound when cooked will last me for several meals.  They're usually the main course.  I add a little bread on the side sometimes, or cornbread.  I know I don't add enough grains to get full protein out of the beans, but that's okay.  If I have to in the future, I can do that.

Many thanks to the person in Denver decades ago who schooled me in how to do these; she brought them to a party; I loved them; and she explained how she did them.  I've been making them ever since.