Cooking tips
Dried Beans: How to Soak, Cook and Digest Them Without Trouble
Chickpeas that cause bloating, beans that stay hard after two hours of cooking: these are method mistakes, not fate. Here is what you actually need to do.
Dried legumes have an undeserved reputation for being complicated and hard to tolerate. Mostly it comes from people cooking them badly: not soaked enough, cooked in hard water with salt from the start, eaten before the body has had time to adjust. With the right method, chickpeas and beans are easy to digest, good, and ridiculously cheap.
Why dried beans cause gas
Dried legumes contain oligosaccharides, complex sugars that human enzymes can't digest directly. These sugars reach the colon intact, where gut bacteria ferment them and produce gas. It isn't dangerous, but it is uncomfortable.
Two things reduce the problem significantly: soaking (which leaches out some of those sugars) and long, thorough cooking. A third route is less well known: introducing them gradually into your diet. Gut bacteria adapt if you eat legumes regularly, and people who eat them two or three times a week tolerate them far better than people who eat them once a month.
Soaking: how long, really
Red (corail) and blond lentils: no soaking needed, 20 to 25 minutes of cooking. Green Puy lentils and beluga lentils: 30 minutes of soaking is optional, 35 to 40 minutes of cooking. Split peas: no soaking, 45 minutes of cooking. Chickpeas, white beans, kidney beans, flageolets: soak at least 8 hours, ideally 12. Use at least 3 parts water to 1 part beans, because they swell a lot.
Change the soaking water. Don't cook in the soaking water: it holds the oligosaccharides that were drawn out. Rinse well before cooking.
Cooking: the classic mistakes
Don't salt the cooking water at the start. Salt toughens the skins of dried legumes and slows their softening considerably. Salt only in the last 10 minutes. Same logic for vinegar or tomatoes: add them only once the beans are tender.
Hard water also lengthens cooking time. Use filtered water, or add a pinch of baking soda to the cooking water, no more than 1/4 teaspoon per quart (liter), since too much gives a soapy taste.
Cooking times by variety
Chickpeas: 1 to 1 1/2 hours after an overnight soak. Lingot or coco white beans: 45 minutes to 1 1/4 hours. Kidney beans: 45 minutes to 1 hour. Flageolets: 45 minutes to 1 hour. Dried fava beans: 1 to 1 1/2 hours. These times vary with the age of the beans: stock older than a year needs 20 to 30% more cooking. Buy from stores with fast turnover.
Storing cooked beans
5 days in the refrigerator in their cooking liquid. 3 months in the freezer in portions of about 7 oz (200 g), the exact equivalent of a can. Cooked chickpeas freeze perfectly, slightly damp, in a zip-top bag. Take them out and put them straight into a hot pan or a hot sauce, no thawing first.
