Best beans for drying
Heather Cole trials various varieties plus free heirloom bean seed!
It turns out beans are good for us and the planet. Pulses make you feel full for longer, take less energy and water to grow and improve soil health
Let’s face it, dried beans have a bit of an image problem – well at least for me they do. Memories of student days, flexing aspiring culinary muscles with the help of the “Bean Booklet” from Real Foods in Andersons Bay. Each of the dozen recipes ended up tasting like wet cardboard and making the whole flat windy. I should have known from the squirrel on the front.
But it turns out that dried beans are by no means restricted to poor students and health food and fibre addicts. A good chunk of the world relies on beans for their primary protein source and, what’s more, they know how to make them taste different. So 20 years on I decided to put the trauma of “Black Eye Bean Bake” and “Lazy Lentils” behind me and give beans a chance.
I’m surprised I haven’t grown beans for drying before but without a huge demand for them in my kitchen, I could never justify the space in the garden to grow them. Since those early efforts, my bean cuisine has been sadly limited to a handful of recipes that I can make taste good: hummus, chili con carne, red lentil curry, Mum’s bean salad and a cannellini bean dip. I’ll even admit to buying canned beans in dubious brines for some of these.
Once I resolved to grow dried beans, though, they seemed to pop up everywhere. The United Nations declared 2016 The International Year of Pulses to celebrate and promote the consumption of pulses around the globe (pulses.org). I have to say it… I have my finger on the pulse.
It turns out beans are good for us and the planet. They are low in fat and high in fibre and protein. Half a cup of lentils will give you the same protein as two cups of rice.
Pulses make you feel full for longer, releasing energy slowly as your body breaks down the complex carbs rather than the quick energy hit you get from simple carbs in sugars.
Beans also take less energy and water to grow and improve soil health. Because they fix nitrogen from the air into the soil, they require less artificial fertiliser, and they grow well in dry conditions, using half the amount of water required to produce animal proteins. But whether a chickpea pattie tastes as good as one of my lamb burgers is a matter of opinion, or perhaps skill.
Before I got carried away with recipes I had to grow the beans. I set aside two garden beds and with the help of Mark Christensen, research director at the Heritage Food Crops Research Trust (heritagefoodcrops.org.nz), I selected 13 dried or “shell out” bean varieties to grow. Mark sent me some of the climbing bean varieties that the Research Trust imported from North America. I added a selection of “good beans” given to me by different folks and a few common bush varieties used for dried beans to round out the trial.
Growing
Beans like a warm soil. Here in Nelson, I sowed them directly into the garden in early November. Don’t be tempted to plant beans too early. If the soil is too cold, they will sit there and rot or germinate and decide against climbing anywhere, then, by the time the soil is warm, they’ve exhausted all their energy just surviving and they give up.
Climbing beans need a good frame to run up, and we could devote a whole article to discussing the many and varied bean fence designs. I opted for reinforcing mesh secured with 2m-high stakes. Spacing for beans varies but as a guide sow climbing beans around 25cm apart and bush beans 15cm apart.
Beans are relatively free of pests and diseases and don’t need a lot of spraying. Just keep an eye out for the usual suspects – aphids, vege bugs and caterpillars. I’ve had years of troublefree bean growing but just because I was doing a trial I got a mystery affliction in my beans. Not long after germination, the leaves of several varieties started yellowing and crinkling and the tips were dying off and refusing to run or bush anywhere. With no obvious gnawing or sucking pests, I was at a loss to know the problem. It looked like bean mosaic virus but I never got to the bottom of it. It reduced the yield of the affected varieties, but I still got a harvest. I gave them a spray with an organic seaweed-based formula being trialled to combat the PSA virus and they seemed to pick their toes up.
While I waited for the beans to grow I expanded my bean cuisine by reading Cassoulet – a French
Obsession, a lovely book by Kate Hill. She unpicks each element of this classic French bean and charcuterie dish and writes quite passionately
Look for a sell- by date when buying dried beans – any over two years old are not worth shelling out for–
about beans. Freshness is all according to Kate, not something I’d considered in dried beans to be honest but according to her, those jars of beans decorating your shelf for the last few years will be starchy tasting and hard to cook compared with “fresh” dried beans. She advocates looking for a harvest or sell-by date when buying dried beans and any over two years old are not worth shelling out for.
Kate also advocates applying a “love the one you’re with” local philosophy to beans not just for freshness but also terroir that means local beans suit local dishes. While in New Zealand she was surprised by the lack of locally grown dried beans and found the imported beans available tough and harder to cook, pointing to irradiation, age or storage as possible culprits. Perhaps there is a place for a grower to supply New Zealand bean buyers with a range of gourmet fresh dried beans? But until then the best option for flavour and variety is to grow your own.
Harvesting
Once the beans are growing, encourage them to carry on producing by picking a few of the first pods. Most are quite palatable cooked, pod and all, before the seeds form. Once you can see the outline of fat bean seeds tight against the skin of the pods, you can shell them out and cook the seeds as fresh beans rather than leaving them longer to dry.
Fresh shelled-out beans aren’t common in our bean cuisine – we tend to use them pod and all or dried to oblivion – but fresh they are a real gourmet treat. They cook in very little time and have a melt-in-the-mouth creamy texture. Try boiling some fresh shelled-out borlotti beans in salted water and you’ll see what I mean.
For storing as dried beans, let the pods mature a few weeks longer until they start to yellow and wither. If it’s dry, you can leave them on the vine until the seeds rattle inside crispy brown pods. If you are going to get rain, harvest the pods when they start to yellow and dry them on racks inside. I found a few old soil sieves propped up in the porch were perfect for this.
When the beans are dry and hard, you have the satisfying task of shelling
When beans are dry and hard, you have the satisfying task of shelling out and storing them for the coming year
out and storing them in glass jars for use throughout the coming year. Mark advised me that annual beans don’t cross very readily, so don’t eat them all – a few dried beans are perfect for saving to grow again the following season.
(But interestingly he also told me that perennial runner beans will cross easily, so need to be grown quite a distance apart, and broad beans also cross easily, so their planting needs to be staggered so that different varieties are not flowering at the same stage.)
Taste testing
Once the beans were grown, dried and admired, we came to the business end of the trial – the taste test. The beans were soaked overnight and the following evening we cooked up each one in nothing but water, then ate our way through a vertical tasting of 13 different varieties, awarding scores and notes on taste and texture. Oh, the things that pass for fun in these parts!
The outstanding winner on the night was Rex and Margie’s Maerawhiti bean with a nutty sweet flavour and creamy texture. I wish I knew the variety, but I’m sure someone will recognise the seed and enlighten me. ‘Good Mother Stallard’ came in a close second with a chestnut sweet flavour, and even, creamy texture– much better than the supposed gourmet borlotti, which we rated as a good flavour absorber, but now something of a has-bean by comparison.
The small pretty ‘Persian Lima’ beans cooked quickly, rated well for flavour and had a uniform creamy paste, but the firm skin held the beans together making this bean well suited to bean salad. Whereas the Mexican pinto, ‘Blue Shackamaxon’ and dwarf haricot would make ideal refried beans with thin skins, creamy paste, and bland flavours.
The soya beans tasted very rich, like the protein parcels they are, and the red kidney beans were sweet and creamy, crying out for some chilli and tomato. I cooked up some dried red kidney beans from the local bulk bin as a comparison, and they took longer to cook, were not as sweet, had tougher skins and a flakier, less creamy texture than the home-grown ones. Proof that even in dried beans freshness matters.
I went on to make an authentically Kiwi version of cassoulet with the remainder of my Maerawhiti beans (see right) and I am making space in this summer’s garden to grow more beans to dry. If anyone has a good big white bean such as the French tarbais, large lima or Spanish habichuelas blancas I’d love to swap some seeds.