Do you have any sense for why people don’t do this? It doesn’t seem like that complicated an idea, which makes me wonder if there is some hidden reason people choose not to.
One guess is that it occupies your cooking pot for a lot longer. So you could soak beans for the evening meal during the day, but you may need that pot to make other meals during the day. (But beans could be soaked in a different container like a plastic tub or bucket.)
Perhaps it’s because of farts? I hope I don’t get downvoted for bringing this up
– it’s serious and, I suspect, a major inconvenience for people who cook beans
from scratch.
It could be that cooking beans for a long time (maybe combined with regular
skimming or whatever other techniques we don’t know about) makes them cause way
less flatulence than soaking them in little water and cooking for a short time.
People recommend soaking for reducing beans’ gas-generation potential, but in my
experience (yes, I’ve used a tally counter to count my farts under different
soaking and cooking conditions and bean species, but obviously N=1) it takes a
lot of soaking water to do that. I’ve found 7 l for 500 g of dry beans to work
decently. After soaking I drain and then cook in a small amount of water.
And soaking with a lot of water has implications that might not work for
Ugandans:
You need a much bigger soaking container than cooking container. (Or have to
soak in multiple changes of water, which becomes tedious.)
You need more water.
If you want a lot of beans for dinner, draining the water becomes physically
difficult for one person.
Speaking of dinner: If you eat three meals with beans per day, you’ll have two
or three containers going for soaking. It’s likely easier to have one pot over
the fire that just gets restarted soon after each meal. (Assuming that
refrigeration is hard to come by in Uganda.)
Further practical issues:
If the beans are small, draining the soaking water requires a sieve or
colander, which people might not have.
Beans start to ferment when soaked in hot weather (as mentioned in other comments, I
think). The more they ferment, the stranger they taste and the longer they
need to be cooked because of acid building up. (Try and cook some beans with
vinegar added to the water.)
It’s easy to forget to start soaking them in time.
Personally, I do soak and use a pressure cooker. But perhaps that’s a luxury.
We are doing a bit of research, and your fermenting comment is a definite fear here, be and I’m going to test how long we can leave them before they start to ferment soon. This might be the biggest single concern issue people have raised so far
The beans here are usually quite big, I don’t think draining is a major issue.
The water issues are good ideas, but my impression is at the moment they are not a major issue.
7 liters per 500g is quite a lot to be sure, but I’m not sure would be a major barrier, I could be wrong
I’m about to make a quickpost with some initial results from our quick community survey, which will address a couple of these at least
By the way, another thing one might try: Adding salt during the soaking and again during the cooking. Perhaps one teaspoon per kg of beans. In my experience, it also reduces cooking times. I haven’t evaluated it rigorously, though.
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.
Cool idea, thanks for sharing!
Do you have any sense for why people don’t do this? It doesn’t seem like that complicated an idea, which makes me wonder if there is some hidden reason people choose not to.
One guess is that it occupies your cooking pot for a lot longer. So you could soak beans for the evening meal during the day, but you may need that pot to make other meals during the day. (But beans could be soaked in a different container like a plastic tub or bucket.)
Perhaps it’s because of farts? I hope I don’t get downvoted for bringing this up – it’s serious and, I suspect, a major inconvenience for people who cook beans from scratch.
It could be that cooking beans for a long time (maybe combined with regular skimming or whatever other techniques we don’t know about) makes them cause way less flatulence than soaking them in little water and cooking for a short time. People recommend soaking for reducing beans’ gas-generation potential, but in my experience (yes, I’ve used a tally counter to count my farts under different soaking and cooking conditions and bean species, but obviously N=1) it takes a lot of soaking water to do that. I’ve found 7 l for 500 g of dry beans to work decently. After soaking I drain and then cook in a small amount of water.
And soaking with a lot of water has implications that might not work for Ugandans:
You need a much bigger soaking container than cooking container. (Or have to soak in multiple changes of water, which becomes tedious.)
You need more water.
If you want a lot of beans for dinner, draining the water becomes physically difficult for one person.
Speaking of dinner: If you eat three meals with beans per day, you’ll have two or three containers going for soaking. It’s likely easier to have one pot over the fire that just gets restarted soon after each meal. (Assuming that refrigeration is hard to come by in Uganda.)
Further practical issues:
If the beans are small, draining the soaking water requires a sieve or colander, which people might not have.
Beans start to ferment when soaked in hot weather (as mentioned in other comments, I think). The more they ferment, the stranger they taste and the longer they need to be cooked because of acid building up. (Try and cook some beans with vinegar added to the water.)
It’s easy to forget to start soaking them in time.
Personally, I do soak and use a pressure cooker. But perhaps that’s a luxury.
Hey Richard thanks so much for the comments.
We are doing a bit of research, and your fermenting comment is a definite fear here, be and I’m going to test how long we can leave them before they start to ferment soon. This might be the biggest single concern issue people have raised so far
The beans here are usually quite big, I don’t think draining is a major issue.
The water issues are good ideas, but my impression is at the moment they are not a major issue.
7 liters per 500g is quite a lot to be sure, but I’m not sure would be a major barrier, I could be wrong
I’m about to make a quickpost with some initial results from our quick community survey, which will address a couple of these at least
Sounds good!
By the way, another thing one might try: Adding salt during the soaking and again during the cooking. Perhaps one teaspoon per kg of beans. In my experience, it also reduces cooking times. I haven’t evaluated it rigorously, though.
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.