Eight Acres

When I was growing up, my family never ate many dried beans, they just weren't something that was used much in NZ cuisine.  If I did eat beans, it was always from a can (and most likely baked beans).  And until recently I was still using beans from a can, but it can be difficult to get organic beans, and to find cans not lined with BPA.  Then I had an opportunity to buy some organic dry goods in bulk, so I bought 5kg of kidney beans, 5kg of adzuki beans and 5kg of chickpea (garbanzo beans).  I know, that is a lot of beans.  And then I didn't really know what to do with them!  Not just what dishes to put them in, but how to prepare them, I just didn't know what method to use. So I decided it was time to learn how to use all these beans that I bought, here's what I found out. I started with an excellent ebook called The Everything Beans Book , from Katie at Kitchen Stewardship, which has lots of bean recipes, but more importantly, an explanation of h...

Last year I was lazy and froze beans without blanching them.  At least I learnt why you need to blanch - all the beans tasted AWFUL!  So this year I am trying blanching and freezing, and hoping we can use our surplus beans over winter.  I was in a hurry, so I just grabbed the first website I found and followed this method.   It was easier than I expected and I will be interested to see if the beans taste better. The reason for blanching is to degrade the enzymes that cause the beans to decay, even when they're frozen.  Unfortunately this also degrades the good enzymes and heat sensitive vitamins in the beans.  For this reason, drying and fermenting are better options for preserving the beans, but freezing is very convenient. The harvest when I returned from 2 weeks holiday half the beans after I gave some away chilling the beans after blanching freezing the chilled beans on a tray the frozen beans in a bag, ready for longterm storage...