Are Beans Part of Your Pantry? They Should be!

Listen to this post as a podcast! The Bean Show is ready for your listening pleasure! You can see all of my past podcasts on The Survival Mom Radio Network!

Do you regularly cook with dried beans? Are they part of your pantry? Are they part of your stockpile? We'll talk about all this and more!

Food storage experts and websites will often encourage you to store dried beans in your emergency food stockpile. While I agree with this encouragement, I also tend to wish experts would encourage people to get really good at cooking with dried beans now! Dried beans are such a great source of protein, vitamins and minerals AND they are a really excellent source of cheap protein.

I know that a lot of people are looking for ways to cut the grocery budget and dried beans can be a really great way to do just that. For example, the cost of a simple beef roast can be upwards of $3.99/lb in my area, and that's not even touching grass fed, organic or all natural varieties either. We're talking about stockyard raised, grain fed beef here. A pound of beans can cost as little at .25 when bought in bulk. A meal of beans and rice, chili with beans or even making the refried beans for your bean and cheese burritos can save a family of 4 a ton of money per meal.

Learning to make a meal out of baked beans with cornbread, chili or even a simple bean soup can be an efective way to ut costs and these methods are usually great for crockpot or oven cooking so you can be doing a lot of other things while dinner is cooking. Anytime I can save money and not be in the kitchen all day, I'm a happy camper. I like to cook, and I love to bake, but always being in the kitchen isn't going to work for me. I have kids to take care of, school to teach and a household to clean and run. By using dried beans, I can make a variety of economical dishes that please my family, can be whole, nutritious foods and not keep me chained to the stove.

Another thing I love about dried beans is how easy they are to store. Sealed in a bucket or pail and kept in a cool dry place, they will stay good for a long time. This makes it both economical and prudent to have dried beans be one of the items that you may want to buy in bulk 25 or 50# bags. I know that my family goes through an allarming amount of small white beans, black beans and small red beans so those are the ones I buy. We prefer refried black beans to refried pinto beans, so I rarely buy pinto beans. However, I buy the other 3 types in large bulk orders because I can get the price down to less than .25 per pound and I know that we will eat them.

Cooking with dried beans, if you haven't already, is a great idea so you can learn what recipes and what varieties of beans your family prefers far in advance of actually needing to use them out of your stockpile. It also helps you to determine what you should store to go along with your beans such as seasonings, spices, vegetables, etc that you like to have to season them with. Maybe you are really fond of baked beans- knowing that you can store the freeze dried or dehydrated onions, molasses, brown sugar and other ingredients to make your favorite recipe.

Now, dried beans do take a little getting used to. They need to be soaked overnight or you need to learn the wuick cooking method. I'm really fond of soaking my beans overnight because I think they have a better texture, but the quick cooking method has it's uses when you forget or when you decide to make a bean dish at the spur of the moment. Dried beans also need to be picked through, because you will often find small stones, lumps of dirt or even little sticks and such. To get dried beans ready to cook you need to follow a couple of simple steps:

• Measure out your beans. Pick through them for any broken beans, or foreign objects.
• Decide which method you are going to use: Overnight Soak or Quick Cooking
• To soak your beans overnight, you will place the clean beans into a bowl and fill with water until it reaches about an inch above the level of the beans. Let them sit overnight (about 8 hours)
• To quick cook the beans, place the clean beans into a pot and fill with water to about an inch above the level of the beans. Place them on the stove and bring to a boil. Remove from heat, place a lid on the pot and let sit for about an hour. Continue with your recipe that calls for beans to be soaked overnight. 

Some people claim that cooking your beans with a little baking soda or vinegar will reduce the gas problems associated with eating beans, but I have never had to cook them that way. My family loves beans and no one has a problem here, so I can avoid that. I suppose I'm lucky that way!

Another thing a lot of people don't know about beans is that they can replace the fats and oils in baking quick breads, cookies, cakes and brownies. You can read more about that in my previous posts The Mysterious Bean Part 1, The Mysterious Bean Part 2 and The Mysterious Bean Part 3. My family LOVES cake that is made with bean puree instead of oil or butter. To be honest, they can't tell the difference when I use beans and not butter! To amke bean puree, just cook the beans but don't drain the liquid. Pulse cooked beans with enough cooking liquid to make a puree and freeze in 1/2 cup portions. When you need some for baking, it defrosts pretty quickly and you know there is 1/2 cup in each bag. Use white beans for light colored baked goods and cookies, black or pinto beans for brownies and chocolate cake. Pinto beans are especially good in spice cake or applesauce cake. The beans help to make baked good pretty moist as well. One word though, and it's about brownies, if you like cakey brownies you can replace 100% of the fat with bean puree BUT if you liek fudgy brownies, don't replace more than 1/2 with bean puree. Usually I do 1/2 bean puree and 1/2 applesauce for brownies to achieve the texture that we like the most.

Cooked beans can be frozen for later and it makes for a great time saver. We really enjoy black beans on nachos, in our taco meat, in burritos, on salads and much more, so on a ay where I', not so busy, I'll cook up a batch and freeze them for later. I just drain the cooked beans and divide them into freezer bags. You could do the same for adding to soups, salads and more. Just take them out the night or morning before you need to use them and let the beans defrost in the fridge overnight or during the day and you can add them to anything you want! I also like to have some small white beans pre-cooked so I can make white bean dip or add them to soups. It's really quite convenient. If freeing isn't your deal, you can always can your dried beans instead and have them sitting on your shelves.

Any way you look at it, beans are good for the budget. They can stretch meat in a dish, replace it altogether, be a main dish, a side dish and addition to a dish or an ingredient in your dessert. Dried beans are easy to store and simple to learn to cook. There are hundreds of bean recipes out there, start trying them to see what you and your family might like. Adding dried beans to my pantry was one of the smartest things I ever did- you won't regret it and you might just be amazed at how much you can come to rely on beans if you give them a shot.

Here are some of my favorite bean recipes:

• Campfire Baked Beans
• Cornbread Waffles With Chili Topping
• Replacing Oils with Bean Puree
• Crockpot Baked Beans
• Simple Beef and Black Bean Tacos

And if that isn't enough you can follow my Bean board on Pinterest, too. 

For more inspiration, check out these podcasts from my fellow Survival Mom Radio Network hosts. These ladies are a fantastic source of information and knowledge!

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