Recipe: Cooking Dried Beans

DRIED BEANS

ex: Soissons Beans which I know really well

1 Soaking

2 12 hours in cold water (10 times the volume of beans) changing the water 3 times* then drain.

3 Blanching

Cover with cold water, when it boils count 5 minutes of boiling, drain them and rinse them with cold water (blanch).

4 Cooking

Pour your beans into a large pot, add 6 volumes of cold water.

Then take a large tea ball and install in it all the spices and flavors you like: (thyme bay leaf ginger, garlic in its skin shallots peppers etc etc) close it and plunge it into your beans, so your beans will cook cleanly and the tea ball with its contents will exhale all the trapped aromas (like a herbal tea) in it.

After 1 hour 20 minutes of cooking at a very gentle boil, test the cooking of your beans, take one out then press lightly on it, if the flesh is tender then at that moment and only at that moment, salt your beans for 15 to 20 additional minutes.

There you have it, your beans are ready, clean and tasty

*The fact of renewing the water 3 times will allow the soaking phenomenon to start again each time

Thank you to my friend Philippe Pouillart professor at the University of Life at La Salle Beauvais for explaining it so well during a class to his future engineer students.

And as we cooks we always continue these researches forward, here for example are "small variations" to try.

Starting from the basic principle that your tea ball inhales all the aromas thus impregnating the beans; try to imagine what you can put in this ball; go ahead (smiles):

Saffron for yellow beans

Cuttlefish ink powder (Sepia) for black beans

Ras el hanout for flavors from the South

Ginger for flavors as