Winter warmup
Upgrade your hearty soup with beans
Awell-cooked pot of beans can be summed up in two words — humble and hearty.
Dried or canned beans don’t need many frills to provide warmth and comfort or extra trips to specialty stores. Toss in aromatics like garlic and onion along with herbs, if you have any, and seasonings like salt, paprika, ground turmeric or garam masala.
To bulk up the dish, please vegetarians by adding carrots, peppers, tomatoes and/or greens. For a double dose of protein and flavor, simmer the beans with smoky ham hock. If you add ground meat or chunks of chuck roast or sausage, you would have a pot of chili. For a more wholesome meal, scoop the beans over some cooked rice.
Beans are rather unique as they are embraced by both the protein and vegetable food groups. Regular consumers of meat or fish consider them to be vegetables, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, but vegetarians count them first in the protein group and then in the vegetable group.
Like vegetables, beans are a good source of fiber, vitamins and minerals. But unlike vegetables, they have a substantial amount of plant-based protein.
An easy way to incorporate beans is to use the canned version, and that is fine in my opinion. Canned does not mean inferior. If you want to reduce the sodium content, rinse the beans in water to get rid of the gooey liquid. Beans are canned with salt and water to create a brine to keep them fresh. With time, however, starch from the beans makes the brine slimy.
If you are like me and have a stash of dried beans, remember it is just as effortless to cook with them. It requires only one additional step — soaking them in water. But it is often debated: to soak or not to soak. There are those who swear against soaking
beans in water, saying it is a waste of time and worse, robs them of color, flavor and nutrients.
I staunchly belong in the other camp and soak them, especially ones like red kidney beans, chickpeas and fava beans, before they are cooked. The soaking not only softens and plumps up the beans but also helps to shor ten their cooking time. A multigenerational tip that has been passed down in my family is to replace the water at least three or four times, while the beans soak, to alleviate flatulence. Natural gas-producing sugars from the beans are leached out into the water and so it is best to get rid of the liquid.
When cooking dried beans with thicker skins, I also add a pinch of baking soda to soften them.
However I don’t presoak the split yellow mung, brown or orange-hued lentils and don’t always soak black-eyed peas, either.
Once you have the beans softened to your liking, use them in any aspect of a meal. When mashed, beans can be made into dips like hummus or become the backbone for a burger patty. Refried beans can add flavorful weight to burritos or be spread over toast.
Rice dishes, pastas and cassoulets are studded with black-eyed peas, cannellini beans, kidney beans and black beans and so are salads with pinto beans, chickpeas and white beans. Even desserts embrace beans. Little red ones often show up in Malaysian shaved ice, Japanese honeyed pancakes, moon cakes and Chinese rice and coconut puddings.
Then there are the soups, which speak in global accents and especially embraced during these wicked cold days. Beans are reliable team players that remind you of the Campbell jingle, “M’m! M’m! Good!”
For many Italian-americans in Pittsburgh, you understand them better when you understand greens and beans. The one-pot favorite is traditionally made with cannellini beans, and the greens var y from escarole to kale to spinach to a blend.
Cannellini beans again speak loud and clear in a fasolada (Greek white bean soup) without overdominating. A punchy green curry soup with black beans is the kind of soup that makes winter bearable. Red kidney beans add heft and texture to a steaming bowl of tortilla soup.
That’s why we say cool beans to winter soups.