Real food. Real life. It ain't always pretty.

Last month, I looked at how to debone a chicken as a faster-than-you’d-think way to save money and reduce salt in your diet.

This month, the money-saving, salt-smashing culinary technique deals with dried beans and legumes. And no, the kitchen reno hasn’t made me lose all sense of proportion. The biggest objection I hear about cooking your own beans is, “But it takes soooo long!”  Well, yes and no. Sure soaking and boiling takes time, but you don’t have to stand there and keep watch. Your active time — picking out stones, pouring water, draining — is only a few minutes. The beans can soak while you sleep and cook while you do other things. Like laundry.

Hmmm. Not sure that scenario helped my case.

Anyway, if you look at the amount of labour involved, cooking your own beans — even chick peas — isn’t all that time consuming. Just think of them as a stock item you always have on hand and not a single ingredient for a specific meal. I’ve been cooking and freezing big batches of beans for more than a year now and not only notice they taste better than their canned counterparts, the texture is far less mushy. This won’t matter in a pureed bean soup, but a bean salad? Why it’ll turn you into a food snob.

The videos below, courtesy of Rouxbe Online Cooking School, run for less than 7 minutes combined and provide all the information you need about soaking, cooking and testing beans.  The only trick I can add is to freeze them in 2-cup batches, since this is approximately the amount in a can of beans. [Read full article.]

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