At this point I am a little baffled as to why soaking is not common practice. I have asked a handful of people, and the answers I have got have mostly been a long the lines of “because that’s how we cook beans” One person said they thought nutrients would leech out. The simple answer is that I think it has been a norm for a long long time, so the question is more how the norm was set I think. I have a couple of very weak ideas smut this.
Time often doesn’t come into a calculation here as it often is considered to have little to no value, in the past, and in many places even now, whether you needed twice as much firewood or not might not have been important at all.
Beans only came to Uganda I think 300 to 400 years ago, so there might not have been as long as other places to optimize cooking norms.
I don’t think water scarcity is a major issues most places now in Uganda. Safe drinking water certainly is, but that’s another Matter. People wash bodies and clothes with far more water than is strictly “necessary” so I don’t think an extra litre to soak beans would mean much if anything. Also you lose a decent amount of extra water boiling for an extra hour which could balance much of the water “wasted” soaking.
I’ll put a bit of effort into asking more people why they don’t soak beans but I’m not sure how much understanding I’ll glean from it.
That’s a great question and a difficult one.
At this point I am a little baffled as to why soaking is not common practice. I have asked a handful of people, and the answers I have got have mostly been a long the lines of “because that’s how we cook beans” One person said they thought nutrients would leech out. The simple answer is that I think it has been a norm for a long long time, so the question is more how the norm was set I think. I have a couple of very weak ideas smut this.
Time often doesn’t come into a calculation here as it often is considered to have little to no value, in the past, and in many places even now, whether you needed twice as much firewood or not might not have been important at all.
Beans only came to Uganda I think 300 to 400 years ago, so there might not have been as long as other places to optimize cooking norms.
I don’t think water scarcity is a major issues most places now in Uganda. Safe drinking water certainly is, but that’s another Matter. People wash bodies and clothes with far more water than is strictly “necessary” so I don’t think an extra litre to soak beans would mean much if anything. Also you lose a decent amount of extra water boiling for an extra hour which could balance much of the water “wasted” soaking.
I’ll put a bit of effort into asking more people why they don’t soak beans but I’m not sure how much understanding I’ll glean from it.