Roasted Legumes: lima bean edition

Given my recent fear of the purported evils of high glycemic foods, I've been interested in anything to prevent my 2 pm attack on the vending machine for that 2 oz pack of Cheese Its I lust for. Some time ago, I posted an interesting snack of roasted cannellini beans. They were a great roasted legume and clearly a good snack even Atkins might approve of.

I've dabbled with the recipe since then; some problems during roasting caused irregularities in the final bean. Some were soft, others ethereal and crisp. This time, I chose Lima to practice with. Aside from over salting them, the texture on these is what I was looking for, uniformly crisp. I think the key is overcooking the bean prior to roasting.

A pound of small lima beans were cooked overnight at barely a perk on the stove. They were overcooked but still hanging together. See final pot of cooked beans.

cooked very well, no al dente here

I drained the beans (carefully, they're kind of fragile) and dumped them in a big roasting pan, squirted them with olive oil and sprinkled salt (mistake, they were cooked in salted water and didn't need this final dash of salt). I didn't work to hard to break up the plopped pile o' beans. As the oven dried them out, I started giving the pan a shake every 30 minutes or so. Eventually all the beans separated into their own crispy goodness and the batch was finished in about a couple hours. Here's the final product. For those couting calories, the oil added prior to roasting was only about 20 grams per pound and the dry-roasted weight about 90% of the starting bean weight. So, I'd estimate a 30 gram sample (1 ounce) to be about 90 calories, 22 grams carbs and 7 grams fiber. Other beans would definitely be good too, but cook them well for a uniform final roasted texture.

final product (go away Cheese Its!)