3.23.2010

Roasted large lima beans

lima bean chips, yum

A while back I made some roasted cannellini beans from cooked canned beans. Pretty cool snack. Not low cal, but low fat and good protein. A few days later I spoke with the owner of Mediterranean Food Imports about their roasted garbanzos. She said roasted beans are NOT cooked beans; simply soaked and slow roasted. I bought some of their roasted garbanzos to test them. Chalky, ich.

I contemplated the difference between roasting cooked vs soaked beans for days. What's the difference between a cooked vs. soaked bean? If a bean's soaked long enough, will it taste like a cooked bean? My thoughts on this are all over the place, but it's a blog and I'm not really responsible for coherent content. Here's what I did in pursuit of a nifty new food snack.

I took some large lima beans and soaked them for about 3 days. Each day that passed the beans became more and more mild and less chalky. I used large limas because they're ... large. I figured I'd still have a good size snack after the hydration/roasting cycle. A day into the soaking, I stripped off the skins and split the lima beans in half. My intention was to finally roast them having all similar size pieces (rather than a mixture of whole and half beans) to aid in final product consistency, and the skins were kept; roasting these nubbins yields little potato chip-like niblets.

After 3 days of changing the water twice a day, I removed the soak water and tossed them with peanut oil (2T), sprinkled them heavily with coarse salt and roasted them for an hour and 20 minutes at 300°F convection shaking the tray vigorously every 20 minutes until they turned golden brown. I pulled them from the oven and they were wonderful. Crisp, little crunch snacks with a lima bean taste and no chalkiness at all. I'm not sure what they'll be like after sitting out overnight. I'll update this observation (if there's any left) later...

4 comments:

  1. All right I'll try roasting with soaking only. I got those garbanzos once by accident and I did not care for them. My last experiment was with Great Northerns, I cooked them first, them smoked them with basil. They turned out pretty good.

    There are pictures in this flickr set here:
    http://www.flickr.com/photos/macmac/4422009445/in/set-72157623592613148/

    I'm really liking beans as snacks. I've been messing around with dried lupini beans too, not roasted, but soaked for like a week.

    Cheers.

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  2. Cool, let me know how long you soak the garbanzos, they should be good.

    Lupini are bizarre. I tried soaking them just for hydrated bean snacks. Everyone said to do them in brine. I, of course, decided to go salt free anticipating it would take a shorter time to get the bitterness out - takes MUCH longer without the salt to de-bitter them.

    I'm also considering using a brine to do the soaking of the beans before roasting. Cooks' Illustrated does this for prep for cooking beans claiming it makes the bean more uniformly seasoned.

    Oh, since I'm blabbing here, I'll be making a couple pounds of your b'fast sausage recipe tonight (unstuffed). Can't wait for the test sausage (quenelle?).

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  3. Thanks for the inspiration! I made some this way with black beans and a little bit of cumin! SO delicious! Thank you! :)

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  4. Black beans? Awesome. Also, try the cannellini, they're awesome.

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