Cooking Beans Part 4: refried beans

Part 1: rinsing and soaking
Part 2: boiling
Part 3: preparing beans ahead of time
Part 4: refried beans

One of our favorite recipes is refried beans. They are great for making burritos and also make a very yummy chip dip.

Start by making a batch of pinto beans (or other beans would probably work). When the beans are soft, drain the beans, reserving the bean water in a bowl.

Use a potato masher, blender, mixer, or food processor to mash up the beans. I like to mash the beans up a few cups at a time and gradually add more. Add bean water as needed to get the consistency you like.

On the stove, heat 1 tbsp. of oil and saute 2-3 cloves of minced garlic for a couple of minutes. Gradually mix the mashed beans with the garlic. If the beans get too dry, you can add some bean water. If you add too much bean water, you can just cook it until some evaporates.

You can add lots of different spices depending on what you like. Cumin, chili powder, and taco seasoning are all spices that work well. I usually just go with the garlic. I also like to add some salsa.

When you're satisfied with the taste and the bean mush is as thick or thin as you like it, you're done. Now you have refried beans.

You can make big batches of refried beans and freeze them in meal-sized portions, just like with regular beans. They are easy to reheat by microwaving them for 1-2 minutes.

As a side note, it is also possible to grind up beans in a mill (check the owner's manual of your mill to make sure!) and use the bean flour as instant refried beans. I have tried it this way and didn't like it as much because I like the more chunky texture of mashed beans.

To make burritos, spoon some refried beans onto one side of a large burrito-sized tortilla that has been heated in the microwave long enough to soften it. Don't put too much on the burrito because you need room to roll it up.

You can add other toppings to the burrito, such as avocado, peppers, tomatoes, sour cream, salsa, cheese, rice, or meat.

Now you roll it up. (I hope that between my instructions and the pictures you can figure it out, because it's kind of hard to explain.) Start by folding up the edge closest to you.

Next fold in the sides.

Starting at the end where the beans and toppings are, roll up the burrito towards the empty end.

If the beans and tortilla are warm, you can eat it now, or you can microwave the burrito for about one minute to heat it up.

Burritos are a nice alternative to sandwiches for lunch. I don't know what's in frozen burritos, but homemade burritos just have beans, a tortilla, and whatever toppings you add, so they are cheap and very healthy.

Cooking Beans Part 3: preparing beans ahead of time

Part 1: rinsing and soaking
Part 2: boiling
Part 3: preparing beans ahead of time
Part 4: refried beans

I was aware of the low cost and the health benefits of beans long before I became comfortable with cooking them from scratch, but one of the main reasons I didn't cook them very much was because of how long it took for them to be ready. Even though most of the time you don't actually have to be paying attention to the beans, it still takes planning ahead so that you can have beans ready for a meal. It didn't really seem worth it to me to spend the whole day cooking beans for just one meal, and I didn't want to be eating leftover beans for the next several days either. I think this is why a lot of people don't cook beans very often.

One solution is to buy canned beans. You can also can beans yourself in a pressure cooker (use the Ball canning book or another tested recipe to make sure they are processed correctly so you don't grow a bacteria colony in your jar). Since you can reuse mason jars and the ring part of the lid, the main costs you would have to consider are the cost of the beans and the cost of the part of the lid that seals to the jar. If that is less than the cost of canned beans from the store, and if you feel that you will get enough uses out of the mason jar, then it's worth it to can your own beans. The disadvantages to canned beans are that they will not last for years and years like dry beans will, the cost is greater, and they also take up more space. The advantages are that you can have beans for dinner without a lot of preparation, and in a situation where you don't have a lot of water or the available water isn't fit to drink you can still eat your beans since they're already cooked.

One other option is to freeze your cooked beans. When I make beans I cook a large batch and then store the beans in 1-cup-sized plastic Glad containers, which I put in the freezer. I don't add any extra water. When I want to use my beans I pull out the amount that I need and either let the beans thaw in a bowl of water or let them heat up in whatever I'm cooking. This works well for soups and casseroles. I don't like it as much for putting the beans on salads.

Well, I wasn't planning to publish the previous post yet, but Kevin had other ideas, so I hope you enjoy it.

last couple of weeks in review

Kevin has been learning a lot of new words. Some of his new words are light, towel, chair, bite (as in, "Can I have a bite?"), door, and outside. It has been rather nice that he has learned how to say bite, because now when he wants something I am eating, he will climb all over me and say, "Bi? Bi? Bi?" instead of climbing all over me and whining. I feel much more inclined to share when he asks nicely like that, although I could do without the climbing : ). A few mornings ago Kevin was running to the door every few minutes saying, "Si? Si? Si?" (Outside) I felt sort of bad that I couldn't take him out because I had something on the stove and it was also already really hot. We need to start trying to get outside nice and early, before it becomes too hot.

Speaking of being hot, my built-in space heater is running nicely. Ryan often checks the thermostat and shivers that it's cold, and I say, "I know, isn't it great?" I'm at least glad that I won't be pregnant in July this time, but it's still really hot.

Here's what happened while I was slicing up peppers to freeze. I wasn't sure if I felt like I had been productive or not.

And here's what happened when I locked Kevin out of the kitchen so I could get some bread mixing. He decided to pull the flour bucket out of the closet. I love how my gamma seal lids make it easy to open the buckets, but sometimes I really hate how my gamma seal lids make it easy to open the buckets.

Here's Kevin singing Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes. I think he learned it at Nursery, but now we enjoy it at home as well.



I strongly suspect that Kevin has learned the Clean Up song from Barney. Often when we are putting things away he will start helping and singing "Nuh Neee Nuh Neee Nuh Neee . . ." I think he must have picked this one up from Nursery as well, because I've never sung it to him.

Baby Girl is still doing well. Her feet and elbows are sharp, but she does seem to be mostly leaving my ribs alone, unlike Kevin. My stomach would like some extra space, though. I think she's already dropped pretty low, which I'm hoping is a good sign. One thing that I've noticed about her is that she seems to be a lot more responsive to the outside world. When I sing or rub my tummy she often kicks and wiggles in response. Kevin didn't respond as much to that sort of thing. We are looking forward to finally meeting her.

I am reading a lovely book called Birthing From Within. I was worried that it would be a really hippie book, and in parts it is, but I have really enjoyed it. I appreciate that it has helped me to think about some of the worries I have about giving birth and also helped me to have positive feelings about it. Kevin's birth was a very sacred and special event, and I am really excited to get to experience that again. There aren't many things that have been as wonderful as holding my own child for the very first time.

I finally mustered the initiative to start packing a bag. Maybe sometime I'll install the car seat in the car. I have been doing a lot of nesting, but those particular projects don't seem very important to my subconscious yet. I think I'm afraid that if I do it the bag will just sit there for several more weeks.

Last week our brother-in-law Kirk came here for a conference, and we got to spend a little time with him. The night he arrived we got sandwiches at Buns, and then before taking him to the airport we walked around Duke campus. We enjoyed seeing Duke chapel and the beautiful Duke gardens.

We also had a nice Relief Society activity last week. For the first half of the class I taught about canning, and then for the second half another person taught about bread making. I was nervous to teach about canning, but I hope that I was able to help people see that canning isn't as hard as you'd think.

cooking beans Part 2: boiling

Part 1: rinsing and soaking
Part 2: boiling
Part 3: preparing beans ahead of time
Part 4: refried beans

After your beans have soaked, drain them and rinse them, the same way you did before soaking. As I mentioned in Part 1, I like to use a colander and rinse the beans with the sprayer on my sink.

Now that your beans are soaked, there are a few different ways you can cook them.

Crockpot

You can put the beans in your crockpot (about 6 hours). This is nice because you don’t have to babysit the beans—and the beans don’t leave a nasty burned ring like most crockpot recipes do!

On the Stove

You can boil them on your stove (1-2 hours, depending on the type and size of bean). Bring the beans to a boil, then reduce the heat (I usually use "2" on my stove) and boil them gently with the lid on until they are tender. When you have waited the recommended time, taste a few beans to see if they are done. If they aren’t, check back in about 15 minutes.

Pressure Cooker

I don't have a pressure cooker and have never tried cooking beans in one, but soaked beans will cook really fast in a pressure cooker (as in, 5-10 minutes!). If the beans are not done when they come out, you can boil them on the stove until they are tender. I also found a video about how to cook unsoaked beans in a pressure cooker: click here to see it at Everyday Food Storage.

If you are using the crockpot or stove, add the following to the beans before cooking:

• 3 cups of water per cup of dry beans (as in, the number of unsoaked beans that you started with)
• 1 tsp. salt per cup of dry beans
• 1 tbsp. oil/fat per cup of dry beans (optional, supposedly reduces foaming)
• Spices if you like (I have never tried adding spices during boiling, so I don’t have any recommendations—sorry!)
• You can also add a ham bone or pieces of ham.

For an electric pressure cooker, I'm not sure if it's okay to add salt or oil or spices.

Boiling Guide for Dry Beans, Peas, and Lentils (if you boil them on the stove)

(I got this from the family cookbook [RT's side], so hopefully nobody minds me posting it here.)

Vegetable (1 cup)	Water (c.)	Boiling time (hrs.)	Yield (c.)
Black Beans	3	2	2
Great Northern	2 ½	1 to 1 ½	2 ½
Kidney	3	2	2 ¾
Lentils (unsoaked)	2	30-40 min.	2 ½
Lima (large)	2 ½	1	2 ½
Lima (small)	2 ½	1	2
Navy	3	1 1/2 to 2	2 ½
Peas, whole	2 ½	1	2 ½
Pinto beans	3	2	2 ½
Soybeans	4	2 ½	2 ½
Split peas	2	1/3	2 ½

The beans are cooked when they are soft and when they have a texture that you like. If they still taste a little gritty or crunchy, then check back in 15-30 minutes to see if they are done. Taste a few beans each time because sometimes you'll find one that is soft even if most of them aren't quite done.

I know there are mixed messages about adding salt during cooking. I have heard that you shouldn't add salt because your food will never cook or your water won't boil. I have also heard that you should add salt because it increases the boiling temperature of your water and your food will cook faster. Salt actually does raise the boiling temperature of water, which means that technically it would take longer for your water to boil, but when it does boil, it would be boiling at a higher temperature and your food would cook faster. However, if you want to have a noticeable effect, you would have to add quite a bit of salt (so your food wouldn't taste good). So, I just add it right away. The main reason to add salt is for flavor. And beans are pretty bland, so you will probably want to add some salt before cooking.

cooking beans Part 1: rinsing and soaking

The plan is for this to be a series of posts about how to cook beans. A lot of this will come from my notes from a class I taught about beans for Relief Society about a year ago.

Part 1: rinsing and soaking
Part 2: boiling
Part 3: preparing beans ahead of time
Part 4: refried beans


Rinsing
The first thing you should do when you begin cooking some beans is to rinse them. The way I like to do this is to measure my beans into a colander and rinse them with the sprayer on my sink. While I spray the beans I stir them a little bit with my hands and watch for sticks and rocks.

Soaking
First of all, you don't have to soak beans. If you cook them long enough, they will get soft. Many people like to rinse their beans and then cook them in the crockpot all day long. If you would like to try this, rinse the beans, and then place them in the crockpot. Cover them with plenty of water (3 cups of water for every 1 cup of dry beans), and add 1 tbsp. oil and 1 tsp. salt for every 1 cup of dry beans. It does take a while for the beans to cook this way, but it is also very easy to be able to throw it all in the crockpot and then have cooked beans for dinner without the extra step of soaking.

There are a couple of reasons that people like to soak beans:

• In my experience, the flavor of soaked-and-cooked beans is different from just cooked beans. Both taste fine, but I prefer the flavor of the soaked beans.
• It reduces the amount of time your stove is on. When you let the beans soak first, this gives the beans time to absorb the water and soften without using extra power, so instead of boiling beans for a few hours, you end up boiling them for an hour and a half or so. Overall, the time will be longer, but the actual cooking time is shortened.
• Many people find that soaking helps reduce the infamous problem of beans causing gas (although not everyone ends up having that problem in the first place). According to centralbean.com and other places, some chemical compounds in beans will react with the bacteria in people’s digestive tracts and cause gas, which is really uncomfortable for some people. Many of those chemicals are washed away with the soak water, which makes it easier to digest the beans.

All that being said, there are a couple of methods for soaking beans:

Long method
Put the beans in a big bowl, cover them with plenty of water (I usually do about 3 cups of water per cup of beans--the beans will absorb some and thus will also get bigger), and let them sit for 8-12 hours. You can start them soaking just before you go to bed and cook them in the morning.

Quick method
Put the beans in a pot with about 3 cups of water for every 1 cup of beans. Bring the water to a boil, then put a lid on the pot, remove it from the burner, and let the beans soak in the warm water for 1-4 hours. I don’t use a timer—I just go back to them when I remember them again.

(The burner is off!)

Note: The first time I cooked beans by myself, I got a little nervous after the soaking stage because my beans were still crunchy when I tasted them. That's to be expected. They will get soft as they cook.

I use both methods, depending on what my plans are, and both seem to work equally well.

Is it worth it to bake your own bread?

Bread in the store is quite expensive. I guess you can get airbread for something like $1.00 a loaf, or sometimes cheaper, but there's a reason it's that cheap. But the better-tasting bread that actually has some nutritional value can cost several dollars.

Many people turn to making homemade bread in an effort to save money on bread. A lot of people insist it saves them money, even if they've never calculated how much it actually costs. But I have also started to see comments from people who say, "I thought I would try to save money by making my own bread, but then after buying all the ingredients I realized that I had already spent a lot more than if I had just bought it." And then you also have to consider if it's worth it to you to spend the time to make it.

Now, one thing that is important to remember is that a very valuable aspect of making homemade bread is that you know exactly what is in your bread. Every single one of the ingredients you put in is something that you can pronounce. And there are a lot of health and taste benefits to making homemade bread. For many people, this is enough, even if it's more expensive to make it than to buy it.

But cost is still a consideration.

So I decided to do some research and calculating and see how much it costs to make one of my recipes for whole wheat bread. This is the recipe:

Crunchy Wheat and Honey Bread

1 1/4 cups water

3 tbsp. honey

2 tbsp. margarine or butter, softened

2 cups whole wheat flour

1 1/2 cups flour

1 1/2 tsp. salt

1 1/4 tsp. yeast

I just throw all of these into my bread machine, and let it run through the dough cycle. Then I shape it into a loaf and bake at 350 degrees for about 30 minutes in my oven.

Wheat
Several places on the internet say 1 cup wheat kernels yields about 1 1/2 cups flour. That's approximately what I usually get when I grind just enough for the recipe I'm making.
There are 56 cups of white wheat in a 25 lb. bag (based on what I measured myself).
White wheat from the cannery costs $11.45 for a 25 lb. bag. (See the order form at providentliving.org.)
A little calculating:
(56 cups wheat kernels) X [(1.5 cups wheat flour)/(1 cup wheat kernels)]=84 cups wheat flour from a 25 lb. bag of wheat
The price per cup of whole wheat flour from the cannery is $11.45/84=$0.14 for one cup of flour.

Now that I've calculated that, below is a spreadsheet that shows the price of a 1 lb. loaf of bread using ingredients exclusively purchased at Kroger, Harris Teeter, and Costco, respectively. Costco doesn't have whole wheat flour here, so I used the price of whole wheat flour at Kroger for that table. The last table calculates the price of making this recipe if I use wheat from the cannery and the rest of the ingredients from whichever store has it for the best price per unit.

I should note that prices for many foods are going up or will go up soon, so these calculations might not be accurate in a couple of months, but I thought I would post this anyway, and then after prices have changed I can do this again and it will be interesting to see what effect it has had.



Explanation of columns in the table:

• Ingredient: I think this is self-explanatory. I am assuming the price of the water is negligible, which it probably is, and the price would be difficult to calculate anyway.
• Price and Amount: These give the price of a bag or box of that ingredient, and the amount of the ingredient in the bag or box.
• Price/unit: This is the number in Price divided by the number in Amount, rounded to three decimal places.
• Unit/measurement: This is copied straight from the table at the top of the spreadsheet. I found these values from the website shown below the conversions. The website converts amounts of various kitchen ingredients between different units of measurement. Since most ingredients are sold by the pound or ounce, I needed these to convert the numbers to cups, tablespoons, and teaspoons.
• Amount required for recipe: copied straight from the recipe, although fractions were converted to decimals.
• Price for recipe: This is the product of price/unit, unit/measurement, and amount required for recipe. It is the amount the you are paying for that particular ingredient every time you make bread.
• The total price to make a 1 lb. loaf of bread is in bold beneath each table.
• Below that is the total price of all the ingredients except whole wheat flour and all-purpose flour.

Observations:

• If you use the least expensive ingredients and cannery wheat, a loaf of this bread costs 50 cents.
• Cannery wheat actually isn't much cheaper than store-bought wheat right now, although normally wheat costs about half of what it does right now. Right now the savings are less than a cent per loaf.
• Yeast from the grocery store is a lot more expensive than if you buy it in bulk at Costco. At Kroger and Harris Teeter, the total price of all ingredients except the flours is nearly half the price of the entire loaf, and this is largely because the yeast costs so much. So just buying yeast at Costco decreases a good portion of the cost per loaf.
• Before I did this spreadsheet I had been assuming that all the ingredients except the flour were pretty negligible and would only account for a few cents. But even using the least expensive ingredients, that was still 14 cents per loaf. It's still not very much, but it's more than I expected.
• Flour is a little less expensive at Kroger than Costco. I had been assuming that Costco's all-purpose flour must be the cheapest, but then again the price of flour at Costco has risen a little bit recently.
• All-purpose flour is less expensive than whole wheat flour, even if you grind it yourself, although when wheat kernels are less expensive the price is probably fairly similar.

So if you only take into account the price of the ingredients, it is probably cheaper to make your own whole wheat bread. You do also have to consider if the time is worth it to you, as well as what equipment you are planning to use. If you are grinding your own wheat, you will also need a wheat grinder, or you'll need to factor in the time spent using a mortar and pestle. If you don't want to mix the bread by hand, you will need a bread maker or a mixer. A mixer and a wheat grinder could cost about $600, so you would need to consider how much use you get out of those before they break down, and if you would save enough money making your own bread to justify the cost of those.

Note: I added a new table to the spreadsheet to calculate how long it would take for an appliance to "pay for itself" in the amount of money you would save by using it. The first column tries various prices for one loaf of bread bought at the store, and the second shows how much you would save by making your own with my recipe. The rest of the columns show how many loaves of bread you would have to make before you would save as much money as you have paid for the mixer or wheat grinder. So if you think about which bread you buy from the store, how often you would make bread instead, and how much bread you make each time, then that can give you an idea of how long it would take to pay for that appliance in savings.

Some more thoughts: Another thing to keep in mind is that homemade bread seems to disappear faster than storebought bread. That's partly because everyone is so excited about the warm bread that it disappears in the first hour, and partly because it's hard to slice it as thin and each slice is more dense than the store's airbread. But that could be a good thing because your family is consuming lots of nutritious and delicious bread. I also find that homemade bread makes me feel full faster and helps me feel full longer than storebought bread. I guess for me, I've stopped wondering if I'm saving money or not by making homemade bread, because I love the taste and the nutritional benefits enough that it doesn't matter to me. You have to make that decision for yourself.