{"id":5448,"date":"2013-08-06T11:34:01","date_gmt":"2013-08-06T15:34:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.allandouglas.com\/blog\/?p=5448"},"modified":"2025-04-21T01:56:40","modified_gmt":"2025-04-21T05:56:40","slug":"dried-beans-a-twist","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pineymountainfoster.org\/thoughts\/dried-beans-a-twist\/","title":{"rendered":"Dried Beans a Twist on an Old Favorite"},"content":{"rendered":"
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My wife and I like making soups and stews with dried beans.\u00a0 Prior to putting in our own garden, we bought bags and bags of various dried beans and bean soup kits (assorted beans and seasoning in one bag).\u00a0 Black beans have always been a favorite of ours, so when I started gardening, I was sure to put in some black bean plants.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\"beans,<\/a>When I think of dried beans, this is the sort of thing I think of.\u00a0 But recently I stumbled across a twist on the dried beans idea: dehydrated green beans.\u00a0 We dehydrate a lot of things: fruit slices, tomatoes, peppers, onions, and a wide variety of herbs, but green beans?<\/p>\n

My green beans are doing quite well this year and I have bunches of them blanched and frozen or canned for later use.\u00a0 And still they come in.\u00a0 So I decided to try drying a batch and see how that works out.<\/p>\n

How to Make Dried Green Beans<\/h1>\n

Pick the beans when tender, wash them and trim off the stem tips and the tails.\u00a0 Cut them into manageable pieces.\u00a0 One note here: cut them into large<\/i> manageable pieces; 3 inches or so, they will shrink up so much that 1\u201d or 1\u00bd\u201d pieces will end up small enough to fall through the grates in the dehydrator trays.\u00a0 Leave them long and break them later if you want.\u00a0 Arrange them in single layers in your trays.<\/p>\n

Refer to the instructions for your dehydrator for times and temperatures.\u00a0 Mine is a basic machine; only one temperature so my main concern was to rotate the trays occasionally to even out the drying.\u00a0 My first batch took most of 3 days to dry in 7 or 8 hour long sessions each day.<\/p>\n

I get paranoid about going off and leaving the dehydrator running unattended all night long, so if the run doesn\u2019t finish in one session, I shut it off and set the trays in the freezer overnight.\u00a0 A fridge would work too, but the fridge in my office stays full, the freezer often has more space in it.\u00a0 And, \u2018freeze-drying\u201d actually seems to speed things as long as they got a good start before going into the freezer.<\/p>\n

The second batch got forgotten until the wee-small hours of the morning when I awoke to the realization that I\u2019d gone off and left it on.\u00a0 I wasn\u2019t going to go stumbling around in the dark, rugged terrain to get to the other building to shut it off: if it hadn\u2019t burned anything down by then it probably wouldn\u2019t.<\/p>\n

That batch ran all day and all night (about 22 hours) and was dry as toast.<\/p>\n

Using Dried Green Beans<\/h1>\n

\"dried<\/a>We haven\u2019t actually done this yet, but based on my experience with other dried vegetables (and statements made in the article I read) reconstituting the beans by soaking them in hot liquid will probably not produce anything you will want to spoon onto a plate as a side-dish for your dinner, but they should be quite good in soups and stews (just toss a hand-full into the stock) or in casseroles (soak in hot water first).\u00a0 It\u2019s also possible that the dried beans can add a crunchy flavor to salads by using them as-is.\u00a0 Dehydrated tomato slices are good this way.<\/p>\n

\"dried<\/a>One of the advantages of drying the beans over freezing or canning is that you can store large quantities in a small space.\u00a0 I processed two 1 gallon bags of beans and ended up with a jar and a half of dried beans.\u00a0 Our storage jars are from our favorite iced tea mix.\u00a0 It comes in a reasonably attractive glass jar that holds about a pint.\u00a0 We have an array of these poor-man\u2019s canisters on our kitchen counter to keep various dried foods at hand.<\/p>\n

Another Dried Bean Twist<\/h1>\n

\"dried<\/a>Sometimes I don\u2019t get the beans picked while they are as young as I\u2019d like.\u00a0 The variety I\u2019m growing this year is particularly susceptible to getting tough and stringy if left too long.\u00a0 We can boil the living daylights out of these older pods and they are still not pleasant to eat.\u00a0 What I\u2019ve been doing with these is to open the pods and take out the beans inside for use in salads and cooking.\u00a0 I don\u2019t care to save seed from these beans for next year, but it occurs to me that if I leave the pods that have matured too much on the plants to dry, like I do the black beans and pintos, these may well make a good dried white bean to add variety to our cooking.\u00a0 White bean chili is a favorite dish in our household.\u00a0 I\u2019ll have to let you know how that works out, but I have high hopes.\u00a0 Have you tried it?\u00a0 If so, leave a note below and tell us of your experience.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My wife and I like making soups and stews with dried beans.  Prior to putting in our own garden, we bought bags and bags of various dried beans and bean soup kits (assorted beans and seasoning in one bag).  Black beans have always been a favorite of ours, so when I started gardening, I was … Continue reading “Dried Beans a Twist on an Old Favorite”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[68],"class_list":["post-5448","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-educational","tag-food"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pineymountainfoster.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5448","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pineymountainfoster.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pineymountainfoster.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pineymountainfoster.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pineymountainfoster.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5448"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/pineymountainfoster.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5448\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21536,"href":"https:\/\/pineymountainfoster.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5448\/revisions\/21536"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pineymountainfoster.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5448"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pineymountainfoster.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5448"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pineymountainfoster.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5448"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}