Long Term: Food Storage Beans

Overnight Soak – For each pound (2 cups) dry-packaged beans, add 10 cups cold water, then let soak overnight, or at least 8 hours.

Cooking Beans – Once your beans have soaked and tripled in size, it’s time to cook them. The most important step in this process is to drain off the soaking water and rinse the beans before cooking to help decrease the gas side effect. Depending on the bean variety, it will take 30 minutes to 2 hours to cook. Make sure and check the package for more specific directions. You’ll know the beans are done when they are tender, but not overcooked. If your beans have been sitting in your food storage for a long time you will need to cook them for a longer period of time. Cool the beans in their cooking liquid if you are not adding them to another liquid, like a soup, when they are done cooking.

Helpful Recipes for Using Beans:

• Low-Fat Brownies: A great tip for using puree’d black beans in your brownies to replace some or all of the oil called for.
• Slow Cooker White Bean Chili: A delicious recipe to make chili in your slow cooker.

Other Helpful Posts on Beans:

• How to Cook your Beans: Information on cooking and storing dry beans.

Other Resources about Beans:

• Planning for Beans: Visit my sister site’s Food Storage Made Easy.NET’s list of Do’s and Don’ts for Beans along with a comprehensive list of beans and their uses.
• Buying Beans: For more information about purchasing beans, visit my sister site The Food Storage Shopper.NET
• Country Beans, by Rita Bingham: For those of you who want to delve deeply into all the glories of beans, this is a great book filled with information on lots of ways to use beans.