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...