Over the past few weeks I’ve been talking a lot about how to save money on your real food bill. There can hardly be a better place to start when considering ways to fit real food nutrition into your budget than the humble bean.
Inexpensive Nourishing Food
Legumes have been a staple of the diet of many different cultures back to the beginning of agriculture. They are commonly thought of now as “peasant food”. This is largely because they are cheap! And for that reason poor folks the world over eat a lot of them. That and that they are delicious and filling. For very little money the cook can provide plenty of calories along with a heaping dose of protein, minerals and B vitamins. And that makes for satisfied eaters!
Legumes are popular in vegetarian diets as a hearty source of calories and proteins. They make a great replacement for meat dishes as a means to stretch those pennies till old Abe screams 
. If you are eating quite a lot of legumes you will want to take special care to ensure that they are properly soaked and the pytates within them are neutralized. Even if eaten only occasionally the home cook would be well advised to handle beans properly to avoid well, hmmm, embarrassing situations .
In my Pantry Principle series I talk about eating beans for a meal or two each week and saving the difference in cost between the cost of beans and the cost of whatever else you would have had. This savings can go toward purchasing a freezer that can help reduce the cost of grassfed beef and pastured poultry and pork by making bulk buys possible. Beans can play an important role in the effort to reduce your overall food bill.
Fresh, Dried or Canned Beans
Which to choose? Many home cooks go with canned beans for convenience sake and they certainly do help out in a pinch. I usually have a few on hand for emergencies myself. But there are drawbacks to eating canned beans. First, canned beans haven’t been soaked properly to ensure the reduction of phytic acid in the beans. The Weston Price Foundation had the following to say about whether canned beans can be considered soaked:
… that is the problem with canned beans, they are softened without the soaking so all the inhibitors are there.
One of inhibitors mentioned is phytic acid. Phytic acid is an anti-nutrient that binds with minerals in your gut making the minerals unavailable for absorption. So while beans are an excellent source of minerals those same minerals will not be available for use by your body if the beans are not properly soaked. This is true of grains as well, by the way, making legumes and grains some of the more difficult to digest foods in our diets. Proper preparation though takes care of the phytates and makes these foods very nutritious and easily digestible. Beans are famous for causing bloating and gas, side affects everyone is anxious to avoid. Proper soaking will help eliminate these digestive difficulties.
Proper Preparation of Beans
Legumes need to be soaked and/or sprouted to reduce the amount of phytic acid present in the bean. Luckily, both of these are super easy to do! They just require a little thinking ahead of time. A easy way to prep beans is to soak them directly in your slow cooker with a little acid. I prefer to use apple cider vinegar with the mother present. Any acidic liquid will work. About 1 tablespoon of acid per cup of beans. Put it all in at night when you finish the dinner dishes and then in the morning just plug-in the cooker and let it go all day. You’ll have a fresh batch of beans for dinner. If you make a large batch, just freeze the rest in portions that are about the size of cans. Then you have a lot of ready-to-cook beans whenever you need them!
Sprouting is an even more effective way to reduce inhibitors like phytate in legumes. It is a little more trouble though. To sprout beans just put the beans in a bowl or jar, add triple the amount of water and let sit overnight. Drain and rinse beans, then let sit in the colander another 12 hours. Rinse every 12 hours until you get sprouts about 1/8-1/2 inch long. Then store them in the fridge and use up within a week.
Canned Beans and BPA
Another issue with canned beans beside phytates is the likelihood that the cans have BPA. As far as I know there is only one producer of canned beans that has BPA free cans and that is Eden Foods. Last I checked Eden canned beans were about 2 bucks a can so they cost considerably more than dried beans.
Dried beans can be a wonder of convenience too although it’s convenience of a different kind. You can buy dried beans very affordably in largish quantities and keep them on hand in your pantry. For the best cooking results don’t buy more than you’re likely to make within the year. Then, whenever the unexpected strikes be it a layoff, illness, large unexpected expense or a weather emergency you will the basis for many affordable meals on hand. Sure, you can do this with cans too, though the nutrition would be less and it would cost more. So give me dried beans 
.
Then there are fresh beans. The option to buy fresh beans doesn’t come up all that often for me (except simple string beans), but when it does I often go for this. Fresh beans are easy to prepare and make for some of the most delicious bean dishes. But it is usually the most expensive option unless of course you grow them yourself!
How to Buy Your Beans
- Excellent ($$$$) – Fresh Organic Beans, soaked or sprouted..
- Excellent ($$) – Organic Beans Soaked/Sprouted and Cooked yourself. From this years crop preferably.
- Very Good ($) – Dried beans soaked/sprouted and cooked yourself. From this years crop preferably.
- Good in Moderation ($$$) – BPA free organic canned beans. These are precooked and simply need to be prepped for your recipe. As far as I know only Eden Foods makes these.
- Okay in Moderation ($$$) – Organic canned beans.
- Okay in Moderation ($$) – Canned beans with only beans, water and salt listed in the ingredients.
- Absolutely Avoid ($$) – Canned beans with a list of additives in it. This would be some of the more popular grocery store bean brands that are basically a bean recipe in a can. Usually has HFCS (High Fructose Corn Syrup) somewhere in the ingredients along with MSG (Monosodium Glutamate).
What do you make with beans? Always looking for new ways to make beans great! If you can share a link to your favorite bean recipe in the comments below.
Links to more about beans
- Dried Beans are Convenient – Mile Hi Mama.
- Eden Foods on BPA free cans – Eden Foods.
- Tutorial on Cooking Dried Beans for Freezing – Spain in Iowa.
- Canning Pinto Beans – The Beginning Farmers Wife.
- Cooking Dried Beans vs. Buying Canned Beans – Frugal Living Now.
- Putting the Polish on Those Humble Beans – Weston A Price Foundation – Lots of technical detail on reducing inhibitors in beans
- Living with Phytic Acid – Weston A Price Foundation – Even more technical detail on reducing phytic acid in legumes and grains.
This post is shared at The Healthy Home Economist’s Monday Mania, The Prairie Homestead’s Barn Hop, Cooking Traditional Food’s Traditional Tuesday, Mamaldiane’s Gathering Spot, Real Food Forager’s Fat Tuesday, Penniless Parenting’s Hearth and Soul Blog Hop,Gnowfglin’s Simple Thursday, Food Renegade’s Fight Back Friday and Real Food Whole Health’s Fresh Bites Friday.
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Kathy lives just outside of Austin with her husband of 19 years Barry, youngest son Jake, two cats and about a dozen chickens. While not a Grandma yet, with two grown kids she remains hopeful. Kathy wants a world where everyone has fresh wholesome food and feels that cookin' like a granny woman is the surest way to get there.
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{ 9 comments… read them below or add one }
I love to cook pinto beans, but never thought about soaking them with vinegar. Makes sense tho; I’ll definitely do it next time. Here’s my recipe…
http://www.thebluehouseblog.com/2011/07/cheap-and-healthy-my-famous-pinto-beans.html
Melissa from the Blue House recently posted..{Happily Ever After} Month Six.
Thanks for sharing
Beans beans, they’re good for your heart…
I cook beans a lot. I always make sure to soak my beans at least 48 hours- I use baking soda, not vinegar, and I get a slight ferment going on there, instead of soaking it in acidic mediums. It seems to work best to eliminate gas. I still get uncomfortable stomach issues even after sprouting them. I’ve been scared to soak beans in acidic mediums, because I heard acid toughens the skin of beans and makes them harder to cook… I sprout my brown/green lentils whenever possible though.
If someone still gets gassy from beans, does that mean the phytic acid still is an issue? Or is it another thing…
Penniless Parenting recently posted..Hearth and Soul Blog Hop
Haven’t had much trouble cooking them after an acid water soak, though I’ve had trouble in the past if I add the salt too soon! That really make beans take forever to cook!
All the soaking and sprouting only reduces part of the inhibitors … depends on the temperature, bean type, acidity, etc. Think roughly half just as a ballpark. Sprouting is a bit more effective. It maybe that they are more sensitive to the remaining inhibitors. Maybe both sprouting and soaking would help in those cases. Worth a try
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Great post, Kathy! I’ve been using refried black beans in my taco meat. I learned that trick from my MIL, but I usually make my own refried beans to make it a little healthier. I try to puree the beans really well since my 6 yr old DS will refuse to eat the tacos if he even sees a bean.
Gasiness is a different issue than phytic acid – beans have a carbohydrate that we don’t digest, but our GI bacteria ferment it just fine.
You can get the convenience of canned beans with dried beans just by cooking in advance, and it’s cheaper and more nutritious.
The beans we typically use include navy, pinto, butter, black and cannellini. I cook them all and freeze each in 2 cup portions as 2 cups is pretty close to “a can of beans” which so many recipes call for.
And you can use them relatively spur-of-the-moment, like when you realize you don’t have enough leftover meat to make a risotto or casserole into a meal and want to throw some beans in for protein.
I soak in a sea salt brine. For black beans, I add lemon juice also. After soaking and draining, I cook them in bone broth, so am adding a LOT of nutrition to them also. I also add Concentrace and vitamin K2 drops to them, as with nearly everything I cook with broth.
If you have hard water (I do), add a pinch of baking soda to the broth to make the beans cook quicker as hard water can make them take forever to soften otherwise.
Basically, I spend about a week cooking beans daily (only adds about 5 minutes to my actual kitchen time when doing regular meal prep), then have cooked beans on hand for months. It’s just a rotation, soak one type, drain and start cooking another, etc. In winter, I tend to cook on the stovetop and keep an eye on them until they’re done, but in summer, I do the crockpot and just let them go.
1 cup dry beans cooks up to about 3 cups. So if I cook 4 cups dry beans, I get 12 cups to freeze, which for me is 6 containers. Doing 4 or 5 types at once means I have gobs of “canned” beans on hand.
It seriously takes almost no time to do this, and since they’re cooked in bone broth with added minerals and vitamin K2, they’re MUCH more nutritious than canned beans, and way cheaper also.
I have hard water too … I’ll have to try the baking soda
. Love the idea keeping beans cooking in a cycle for a week or so. I think I’ve got freezer space …. hmmmm …
After a little experimenting, I found a way to can beans (beginning with dry/soaked) in my pressure canner 7 quarts at a time. It only takes an hour and a half. Super easy and super time saver! They also tend to stay in their natural form this way.
I don’t sprout beans or grains often yet, but I have noticed that when I do, they are much more filling. We’ve made sprouted spelt bread and sprouted lentil soup and we ate less than half what we normally do–this is due to the higher nutrients I presume.
Keep up the good work–I love your blog!