Don’t Waste Your Precious Beans Soaking Water
My favorite beans are Lima beans, which means I’m no stranger to soaking beans overnight . You may be able to skip the soak step with fewer beans, but Lima requires it. (If there’s one thing I hate to taste through my teeth, it’s undercooked Lima powdery beans.
Beans require soaking water to soak, and many bean recipes recommend pouring this water out after the soak is complete. Then you need to rinse the beans and cook them in fresh water. I have never done this because I am against unnecessary performative labor. I rinse the beans (and remove any shriveled specimens or tiny pebbles) before I soak them, so why would I rinse them again?
According to the bean thinkers at Rancho Gordo , water tossing has long been thought to help reduce gastrointestinal distress (some argue “a bunch of water!”), But there is “conflicting scientific evidence that changing water lowers gas.” You are probably not only relying on flimsy scientific evidence, but you are also throwing the scent down the drain.
“They now think that vitamins and flavors can be leached out of the beans into the steeping water that you throw in the sink,” the bean experts explain, before adding, “If you want, do it. If it seems unnecessary, don’t. “
I, for one, will not. Lima beans don’t seem to be giving my stomach much trouble anyway, but more importantly, I’ve always found beans cooked in their steeping liquid to have a richer, darker, and more flavorful broth.
I’m not the only one who noticed this. When Epicurious tested the beans cooked in the steep versus the beans cooked in fresh water, they found that “the beans cooked in the steep were much more flavorful, had a more beautiful, darker color and retained their texture better. “.
So, if you, like me, have always boiled beans in their soak water: Congratulations, we were right all along. But if, for fear of farting, you’ve emptied the soak water and replaced it with fresh, “clean” water, don’t worry. There is still time to change your lifestyle and start a new chapter in your life about eating beans – a chapter that is sure to be tastier than the last.