Beans, Beans for Every Meal
A letter from our publisher.
Beans, Beans for Every Meal
A letter from our publisher.
When my sister, Lina, and my brother-in-law, Glen, come over for dinner, I have one rule for them: Bring some of Glen’s home-canned beans. His beans are creamy and “meaty,” and some nights, they are all I eat for dinner. I like to eat them warm with salt, oregano and extra virgin olive oil.
Glen told me that, when he was a kid, the only beans he knew came in one form and that was the revoltingly sweet and soggy cans of pork and beans. He grew up believing he hated beans, but then he met my sister. She took him over to my parents’ house for dinner, where he tasted my mother’s fagioli (Italian for beans). His diet was changed forever after that meal.
In 1993, Glen discovered Romancing the Bean, a book by Joanne Saltzman, and never looked back. He tells me there are many ways to attain beautiful soft and creamy beans, but his go-to method is to pressure can them, using an All American brand pressure canner that can hold 41 quarts. He stresses using fairly accurate measurements as just small changes can cause vastly different results. He uses half-liter jars produced by the same manufacturer. Glen weighs the volume of dried beans per jar at 108 grams (DRY WEIGHT). A gram or so off is OK, but any more than that will almost surely render inconsistent results in your end product.
Here’s how to make them:
Preparing the beans
Almost all medium-sized beans will give you good results using the above weight per jar. Glen doesn’t recommend this method for pinto beans or some of the smaller varieties as they tend to be softer and break down too much in the process. His favorite two varieties for canning are borlotti (sometimes called cranberry) and romano, which he has grown in his backyard since my father gave him a seed many years ago. Chickpeas also lend themselves well to this process. When choosing dried beans, keep in mind that the lighter color usually indicates the newness of the beans, meaning the darker they are, the longer they have been in storage. Newer beans will yield a creamier texture when cooked. Pressure canning is the true magic to attaining the creamiest beans. Although you can get good results without a pressure canner, I recommend you use one.
The process
Either long-soak the beans overnight covered with water, OR you can quick soak the beans by covering them with water in a saucepan, bring to a boil, boil two minutes and let them stand for an hour.
Pack them in jars: half-litre or full-litre mason canning jars, leaving about one inch of headspace. Then, top up each jar with clean boiling water (such as from a kettle) or with the water in which you just boiled them, maintaining headspace. Then de-bubble, adjust the headspace and wipe the jar rims, before putting seals and lids on.
The processing pressure should be set at sea level: 10 lbs weighted gauge, 11 lbs (76 kpa) dial gauge.
Processing time: 500-ml jars should take 75 minutes; one-litre jars take 90 minutes.
Glen usually adds a bay leaf, a pinch of epazote, oregano and salt. Sometimes, he’ll add a pinch of dried hot peppers.
Enjoy.
Follow us
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Want to republish a Modern Farmer story?
We are happy for Modern Farmer stories to be shared, and encourage you to republish our articles for your audience. When doing so, we ask that you follow these guidelines:
Please credit us and our writers
For the author byline, please use “Author Name, Modern Farmer.” At the top of our stories, if on the web, please include this text and link: “This story was originally published by Modern Farmer.”
Please make sure to include a link back to either our home page or the article URL.
At the bottom of the story, please include the following text:
“Modern Farmer is a nonprofit initiative dedicated to raising awareness and catalyzing action at the intersection of food, agriculture, and society. Read more at <link>Modern Farmer</link>.”
Use our widget
We’d like to be able to track our stories, so we ask that if you republish our content, you do so using our widget (located on the left hand side of the article). The HTML code has a built-in tracker that tells us the data and domain where the story was published, as well as view counts.
Check the image requirements
It’s your responsibility to confirm you're licensed to republish images in our articles. Some images, such as those from commercial providers, don't allow their images to be republished without permission or payment. Copyright terms are generally listed in the image caption and attribution. You are welcome to omit our images or substitute with your own. Charts and interactive graphics follow the same rules.
Don’t change too much. Or, ask us first.
Articles must be republished in their entirety. It’s okay to change references to time (“today” to “yesterday”) or location (“Iowa City, IA” to “here”). But please keep everything else the same.
If you feel strongly that a more material edit needs to be made, get in touch with us at [email protected]. We’re happy to discuss it with the original author, but we must have prior approval for changes before publication.
Special cases
Extracts. You may run the first few lines or paragraphs of the article and then say: “Read the full article at Modern Farmer” with a link back to the original article.
Quotes. You may quote authors provided you include a link back to the article URL.
Translations. These require writer approval. To inquire about translation of a Modern Farmer article, contact us at [email protected]
Signed consent / copyright release forms. These are not required, provided you are following these guidelines.
Print. Articles can be republished in print under these same rules, with the exception that you do not need to include the links.
Tag us
When sharing the story on social media, please tag us using the following: - Twitter (@ModFarm) - Facebook (@ModernFarmerMedia) - Instagram (@modfarm)
Use our content respectfully
Modern Farmer is a nonprofit and as such we share our content for free and in good faith in order to reach new audiences. Respectfully,
No selling ads against our stories. It’s okay to put our stories on pages with ads.
Don’t republish our material wholesale, or automatically; you need to select stories to be republished individually.
You have no rights to sell, license, syndicate, or otherwise represent yourself as the authorized owner of our material to any third parties. This means that you cannot actively publish or submit our work for syndication to third party platforms or apps like Apple News or Google News. We understand that publishers cannot fully control when certain third parties automatically summarize or crawl content from publishers’ own sites.
Keep in touch
We want to hear from you if you love Modern Farmer content, have a collaboration idea, or anything else to share. As a nonprofit outlet, we work in service of our community and are always open to comments, feedback, and ideas. Contact us at [email protected].by Frank Giustra, Modern Farmer
January 15, 2020
Modern Farmer Weekly
Solutions Hub
Innovations, ideas and inspiration. Actionable solutions for a resilient food system.
ExploreExplore other topics
Share With Us
We want to hear from Modern Farmer readers who have thoughtful commentary, actionable solutions, or helpful ideas to share.
SubmitNecessary cookies are absolutely essential for the website to function properly. This category only includes cookies that ensures basic functionalities and security features of the website. These cookies do not store any personal information.
Any cookies that may not be particularly necessary for the website to function and are used specifically to collect user personal data via analytics, ads, other embedded contents are termed as non-necessary cookies.
Italians will dispute your saying that borlotti and cranberry beans are the same. Cranberry beans are an acceptable alternative bean but they are definitely not borlotti beans. My first bowl of pasta fagioli in Venice convinced me of that fact.
A very wholesome share with prep and process included. Thank you from my enrire being not just my heart. We need to get back to sharing our wisdom. I plan to research how to obtain Joanne Saltzman’s book, Romancing the Bean. I find older books are enjoyable and full of methods nearly forgotten by most. Me included. It would not harm any of us to get back to basics. Invest in ourselves and one another by knowing what goes into our meals starting from the earth upward…
The 41 qt pressure canner actually holds 19 qt jars. Pretty good but no one should think it holds 41 qt jars.