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Bean Talks
Vogue, March 2006 Page 444
In a quest for the elusive perfectly cooked bean, Jeffrey Steingarten
makes three earthshaking discoveries.
"What a fiasco," I exclaimed under my breath, chuckling appreciatively.
"What a fiasco," I repeated. I liked the sound of it. In Italy, a
fiasco is, among other things, a flask, a wine bottle, often the type
wrapped in wicker and later recycled as a candlestick on a slippery
red-checkered oilcloth in a modest American Italian restaurant where
you can get an eight-inch-tall lasagna that oozes uncontrollably under
your fork before toppling over. But in Tuscany, where the people are
known as mangia fagioli, "bean eaters," a fiasco is what people once
cooked beans in-white cannellini and toscanelli beans, earthy borlotti
- all night in a wine bottle set into the smoldering embers of a
fireplace. This preparation is known as fagioli al fiasco.
My fiasco looks less like a cheap chianti bottle and more like a flask
in a chemistry lab-an Erlenmeyer flask, to be precise. I bought it
thirteen years ago at a housewares store in Montecatini Terme, a
renowned spa town halfway between Florence and Lucca, and famous since
the Middle Ages for its curative and distasteful volcanic waters and
its fango, its beautifying mud. Not for the first time, my wife crowded
her days with costly treatments while I inventoried the gelaterie of
Montecatini Terme.
My fiasco is conical, has a short cylindrical neck, and is plugged by a
large cork, which in turn has a round hole in it that is stoppered by
another, smaller, cork. If the pressure inside the fiasco gets
perilously high, the little cork pops out of the big cork-long before
the fiasco explodes, one hopes. The body is decorated with red
lettering that says ANTICO VASO PER LA COTTURA DEI FAGlOLl and a
primitive drawing showing an Erlenmeyer flask over a powerful open
flame, which is an inadvisable thing to do with your fiasco. Believe
me. This is my second fiasco from Montecatini Terme. I bought both
fiaschi in hopes of solving my bean problem. I'll bet you have a
serious bean problem, too. If you think you don't, you either are in
deep denial, couldn't spot a perfect bean if you swallowed one, or are
among the few living humans without a bean problem, in which case
please let me know your secret. Please.
The only bean problem worth the name is not digestive (that
unattractive intestinal-gas buildup is avoidable for most people and in
most recipes). No, the problem is aesthetic - the inability to produce
a perfectly cooked bean, by which I mean a bean whose skin is smooth
and flawless like porcelain, whose form is plump with goodness, and
whose insides are creamy, like the silkiest mashed potatoes - neither
crunchy with undercooked starch nor watery from overcooking. (There was
a fashion fifteen years ago to serve beans al dente, with crunchy,
starchy, flavorless interiors. Those were the days whcn undercooking
everything was popular, and many people considered raw vegetables
served at cocktail parties to be a form of food.) Their taste should be
pleasantly beany. Why are ideal beans such as these so elusive, so
unattainable? The Heinz company has been turning out perfectly cooked
beans ever since I can remember. That's the demoralizing part. Just
open a can of their baked beans and see how awful it makes you feel.
Why should we care? To start with, beans and other legumes make up more
of the world's diet than anything but grains. And a fine thing it is,
because beans are extremely good for us, have a low glycemic index, and
contain at least twice the protein of grains. Most crucial to
gastronomes like you and me, beans are the basis for so many of
humankind's most wonderful dishes. I keep a little list called 'The 200
Greatest Dishes of the World." Very near the top, close to the greatest
dish ever made, is cassoulet, that masterpiece of southwest France, a
vast casserole of perfect white beans, each beautifully intact, among
which are buried the most savory meats on Earth-fat legs of preserved
goose and duck, succulent sausages, and unsmoked bacon. The cassoulet
is baked in a slow oven for several hours until the top crusts over
with a savory mantle of bread crumbs and bean starch glazed in the
goose and pork fat that have floated to the surface.
Also on my list are several of the great bean soups of Tuscany. And
beans can be enjoyed just by themselves, cooked with an herb or a spice
or two, or a bit of tomato and a splash of the best olive oil, and when
they're done, fresh black pepper. (Lots of people unaccountably love
them cold in the form of two-bean salad, three-bean salad, four-bean
salad, and so forth.) The meal that changed my life, bean-wise at
least, was in Tuscany, where our hosts took us to a simple trattoria
called Cecco, in the town of Pescia, renowned for its vast flower
market, halfway between Montecatini Terme and Lucca. Among the many
rustic delights we were served were small bowls of fresh (not dried)
white beans that had been cooked with fresh sage leaves and garlic,
then paved with thin slices of bottarga - a salty, pungent condiment
made from the dried, pressed roe of the tuna or gray mullet from the
Tuscan coast-and blessed (as the Italians put it) with strong ncw,
local olive oil and a good grinding of fresh black pepper. That was the
day I became a mangia fagioli. a bean eater.
A word about fresh beans: Beans can be eaten at several stages of their
growth. Take the green bean, the haricot, once called the string bean
before breeding eliminated the strings. When the plant is immature, we
pick the sweet green pods and steam or boil them. The seeds inside are
insignificant-tiny, soft, and white. Or we can let the pods grow to
near-maturity and remove the rows of shiny seeds inside-off-white, with
a faint green tinge, full-blown beans, nearly skinless. These are what
we ate at the trattoria Cecco. Or, we can wait and harvest the mature
pods, dry and papery from the sun, and remove the dried white beans
from inside each pod. These can be stored indefinitely. then soaked in
water until they closely resemble their fresh state, their lost
childhood recaptured. Fresh white beans are not easy to find in this
country. In Italy. several types carry a pedigree. The beans at Cecco,
as famous as any, are known as Sorana beans because they're grown on
the left (or was it the right?) slope of the Sorana valley, to the
north of Pescia. Despite the likelihood that it is the soil and water
and the path of the sun that account for the excellence of So ran a
beans at least as much as genetics do, I nonetheless brought back a
pound of them and urged a young farmer at the Union Square Greenmarket
to plant them. I must have explained the concept of fresh white beans
very poorly because the farmer, worldly and educated though he was,
plowed them under almost as soon as they had pushed their little
tendrils above the earth. A few years later, the same farmer had seen
the light, and his fresh white beans were so much in demand that
fistfights broke out at the market between sous-chefs from the
restaurants Daniel and Bouley, vying for a pound or two of his tiny
crop. The moral of the story is: Beans are among the foundations of
world civilization, our sustenance and our pleasure. So, if you can't
cook the perfect bean, you should not, in short, cook at all. And that
is why I have set sail upon this voyage from the Shoals of Ignorance
and Confusion toward the distant Shore of Truth. But where to start?
With first principles, of course.
What is a bean? I wondered. The Oxford English Dictionary thinks it's a
"smooth, kidney-shaped, laterally flattened seed, borne in long pods by
a leguminous plant." But what is leguminous? "Of or pertaining to the
family leguminosae, which includes peas, beans. and other plants that
bear legumes or pods."
There you have it. A bean is a bean is a bean. A bean is a seed that
comes in a pod. But which kind?
Right now, you and I are interested in the ordinary Phaseolus vulgaris
(which means common, not boorish and off-color). These are among the
greatest gifts of the New World to the Old, and they come in 4,000
varieties, of which kidney beans, white beans, black beans, and pintos
are the most common. This-specifically the white navy bean-is what
Heinz uses to make its iconic baked beans.
Most people cook dried beans in two stages: First they soak the beans
overnight in cold water, then they boil them. (Some prefer
quick-soaking: The beans are boiled for a few minutes, allowed to cool
for an hour, then rinsed, and cooked.) Simple enough. But bitter
controversy swirls about every mini-step, every grain of salt. To
discover the ideal method, I first made a list of all the advice that
cookbooks, chefs, and food scientists give for cooking dried white
beans. Then my plan was to test each one and arrive, once and for all,
at the way to cook a perfect bean.
Step 1. Soaking. Why soak your beans at all? The outside skin of a
dried bean, called the seed coat, is waterproof. And the insides are
very dry. If the hard tiny starch granules within the bean cells can
absorb water, they'll become soft and creamy. But here's is the
shocker: The only way for water to enter a dried bean is through the
tiny hole or pore along the concave curve of the bean. (I find this
hard to believe, but it's confirmed by Harold McGee in his revised,
expanded On Food and Cooking, which is nearly all I need to know.) This
pore is called the hilum. After enough water has got through the hilum,
the skin softens, water can be absorbed more easily, and the bean is
ready to cook. The ideal soaking and cooking times for dried beans
depend on whether they were recently harvested or picked several
harvests ago. Badly stored old beans develop what the industry calls
the HTC defect. HTC stands for "hard to cook." Seriously. HTC beans may
never soften, no matter what you try. And you'll never know ahead of
time. The best you can do is buy the least shriveled dry beans from a
source that's likely to have fast turnover. For my various tests, I
bought 30 pounds of dried kidney-shaped, laterally flattened seeds,
navy beans and Great Northerns, all at the same shop and from the same
producer.
What if you simply boil dried beans from the start? Won't they first
slowly absorb water through their hilums, after which their starch will
be moist enough to start cooking? I've tested this. It works. But the
beans end up in sloppy shape-unevenly cooked, ranging from overly firm
to watery; skins split or sloughed off; with lots of loose starch
clouding the water. Far from perfect.
Next I tested the quick-soak method, followed by cooking. The beans
were falling apart, though not as badly as dried beans boiled from the
start. So I had gone no further than square one: Simple soaking
overnight is best. How can you tell when a bean has been properly
soaked? Just fish it out of the water, slice it in half crosswise, and
see whether the insides, largely starch, have become translucent.
They'll still be crunchy and brittle but will have lost all that
opaque, superhard, dry starch near the center. Now they're ready for
cooking.
You read lots about soaking with baking soda and salt. Baking soda
makes beans soften more quickly. Too much baking soda and your beans
will be slimy, taste funny, get mushy, even fall apart. Salt in the
soaking water speeds the cooking but not the soaking. That's what
people say.
Time for some testing. I tried all these soaking variations; the next
day I cooked them all. We tasted them critically like the true bean
connoisseurs we've become, we being shorthand for my wife, my peerless
golden retriever Sky King, and me.
The verdict? The best-looking beans - plump, intact, gemlike,
pearlescent - and the fastest to cook were those that had been soaked
in both salt and baking soda. But they had entirely lost their flavor.
Cooked unsoaked beans had the most beany taste-too much, I think. And
they ended up gloppy. Beans soaked in plain water seemed the best.
Back to square one. Net progress: zero. It was becoming apparent that I
had been foolhardy and presumptuous to begin with first principles.
Sure, it was courageous and manly, but it had been a reckless courage.
Yet how quickly the daring explorer soars from depression to heady
exaltation. And so it was with me. For within days, I would make three
major discoveries that would change the cooking of beans as we know
them, forever.
Step 2. Cooking. After soaking their beans, most people simmer or boil
them in water. Surrounded by very hot water, at 160°F and above, the
hard starch granules in the bean cells absorb the water, swell to many
times their size, and form a tender gel, which turns the insides of the
beans creamy. Several ingredients are said to slow the cooking, even
keep the beans hard and toughen their skins. These are sugar (including
molasses), salt, and anything acidic, such as tomatoes. If we want our
beans to absorb these flavors, we have to add them near the end. When
preparing most complicated bean dishes, such as cassoulet and Boston
baked beans (also on my list "The 200 Greatest Dishes in the World"😉,
you begin with fully cooked white beans, add delicious flavorings, and
bake them for a long time, during which the flavors permeate the beans.
I wanted to try some alternatives to boiling. Although my fiaschi had
never yielded perfect beans, the basic principles seemed worth trying.
Is a fiasco like a primitive pressure cooker in an old chianti bottle?
I telephoned my old friend Lorna Sass, who is a great expert in
pressure cooking (she wrote the standard Cooking Under Pressure and is
now just finishing her Whole Grains Every Day, Every Way [Clarkson
Potter, scheduled for November 2006]). Pressure cookers break up beans,
she warned. They don't cook better, only faster. The best you can do
with a pressure cooker is to cook them partway, finishing them with the
cover off.
I got down my big, old pressure cooker and spent several days hunting
for the little weight that fits on top and jiggles back and forth,
spewing steam and simulating the sound and look of a land mine on the
verge of detonating and slaying a family of three. I gave up and
acquired a beautiful, intelligently designed high-tech eight-quart
electric pressure cooker from Russell Hobbs, a major British
manufacturer. You put the beans and water inside, lock on the cover
with a little lever, set it, and forget it. It doesn't make the
slightest sound or leak even a wisp of steam. A readout tells you
what's happening, and when you open it again, almost by magic, the
beans are nearly cooked. Then, after I stirred in salt and left the
beans on the WARM setting for an hour or two, they finished
cooking-absorbing water-and ended up nearly perfect in texture and full
of be any flavor.
Or does a fiasco work through long, low-temperature cooking? That was
certainly worth a test. I got out a double boiler, heated water in the
bottom, put a pound of Great Northern beans on top along with a quart
and a half of water (a handy ratio for cooking beans), put on the
cover, and stirred from time to time. To make sure the beans stayed
nicely below the simmering point, I set the flame so low that the water
on the bottom was barely shivering and was never in physical contact
with the pot. After an hour and a half, the beans were translucent but
still very crunchy. Where had I seen that before? Aha! I had just
discovered a completely amazing new way of soaking beans
quickly-without subjecting them to the disintegrating force of boiling
water. At last I had hit upon something truly useful! You'll never need
to soak again. I'd rank this a true life-changer.
It was inevitable that the time would come when I would leave the beans
in my double boiler way past one-and-a-half hours. And the result?
After three hours, plus an hour to cool down and firm up, and without
ever bringing the beans to a boil, and adding two teaspoons of salt for
each pound of beans near the end, they ended up nearly perfect. Another
life-altering discovery! Is this how the fiasco is supposed to work?
Maybe. But after reading a bit more about fagioli al fiasco, I ended up
confused. Some sources have you presoak and others don't. Still others
mix the water with lots of olive oil, then stopper the fiasco loosely,
with cloth, to allow the steam to escape, all in order to make the
beans absorb delicious oil. And a good number of sources say that a
fiasco is or was used only for cooking fresh beans! I never had a
chance. What a fiasco!
Having made two major innovations in the soaking and cooking of dried
beans, I felt I could now telephone the Heinz company-by my standards
the greatest bean cook in the entire world-and converse with them as a
near equal. I spoke with six highly placed, enormously helpful
officials in the Pittsburgh headquarters and in Britain, where Heinz
beans on toast has become a part of the national breakfast.
It became immediately apparent that Heinz has a massively unfair
advantage over us amateurs. They buy most of their beans in the Midwest
and Ontario, Canada, and test every batch-which vary by the time of
year and area where they're grown-for their ability to absorb water,
how well they'll hold together before and after cooking, how intact
they'll be, how many will remain hard and how many become broken, and
how many will lose their skins. Then Heinz adjusts the cooking of each
batch to achieve perfection. Heinz cooks its beans in two stages. They
call the first one "blanching," but it seems more like soaking in hot,
circulating water for a certain amount of time; they wouldn't tell me
just how long. I guess that Heinz discovered my hot-soaking method
before I did-though I've never seen it published. At the end of the
blanching stage, the beans will have absorbed some water all the way to
their centers.
Heinz then mixes the beans with its secret sauce and cooks them right
in the sealed cans at a temperature not normally available to us
laypersons, about 250°F, which is way above the boiling point of water.
How could I duplicate this at home? In my brand-new Russell Hobbs
electric pressure cooker, that's how! I hot-soaked a pound of beans,
added flavorings, poured them into a half gallon Ball jar, sealed it,
laid it on its side in my Russell Hobbs, and cooked the contents at
high pressure for 20 minutes, a duration arrived at through sheer
guesswork. During this time, I stayed clear of the kitchen. (A pressure
cooker reaches 250°F by subjecting its contents to high pressure, which
I thought might implode the Ball jar.) But there was not even a peep.
Then I added salt and resealed the jar and let the beans cool awhile in
their juices. Again the result was a huge batch of nearly perfect
beans. Heinz needs these high temperatures to sterilize the contents of
the can and avoid botulism. For you and me, the advantage of using a
sealed jar is to keep the beans from smashing into one another, and the
high temperatures speed up cooking exponentially. What if I had put the
jar in a stockpot of simmering water? I tried it. A full three hours
passed (plus an hour to cook after the addition of salt) before the
beans inside the jar had become ... ideal little pearls of pleasure.
These days I seem incapable of anything but perfect beans. My lifelong
bean problem has been completely cured.
Now, at long last, we're ready to prepare one of the simplest
masterpieces in all of gastronomy-in three new ways. Wash a pound of
dried Great Northern beans, discarding the broken, discolored, and
shriveled ones. Hot-soak them, covered, in six cups of hot water in the
top section of a double boiler set over, not in, barely shivering water
on a very low flame. Gently stir from time to time. After about an hour
and a half, test the beans to see that they're translucent through and
through. Note the water level, then drain and rinse the beans.
Now cook them in one of these three ways:
I) Put them back in the double boiler, gently stir in two tablespoons
of very good olive oil, six fresh sage leaves, crushed, and two lightly
crushed unpeeled garlic cloves. Add hot water to the previous level,
cover, and continue cooking for another hour and a half, or until the
beans are creamy. (Make sure the water never even bubbles.) Stir in two
teaspoons of salt and let the beans cool for an hour in their juices.
2) Put the beans into a half-gallon jar, stir in the sage, garlic, and
olive oil, screw on the lid, and put the jar in a large pressure-cooker
for 20 to 25 minutes at high pressure. After another 20 minutes of
cooling, open the pressure cooker, remove and uncap the jar, and stir
in two teaspoons of salt. Let the beans cool and firm up in their
liquid for an hour or more.
3) Follow the instructions in 2) but instead of using a pressure
cooker, immerse the jar in a large pot of nearly simmering water for as
long as three hours until the beans are creamy. When the beans have
been cooked in any of these three ways, divide them into six to eight
portions, using a slotted spoon. Moisten each portion with several
tablespoons of cooking liquid. Grind a generous amount of black pepper
over each one, followed by a drizzle of olive oil.