“Why do you have to soak beans for a day?”
It sure does seem like a pain when you’re hungry to be working on tomorrow’s dinner, after all, but the fact is that soaking beans for a day makes healthier beans and they actually cook more quickly.
Beans have a substance called phytic acid which bind to magnesium, iron, zinc, and calcium and keep you from absorbing as much of these minerals as you would have otherwise. Particularly if you rely on beans for iron and zinc as complete vegetarians do, you will benefit from soaking your beans.
I actually recommend soaking them for quite a few hours (18 give or take) at high temperatures (140 degrees give or take, mainly take). I’m kind of scared of the 140 degree recommendation, however. I have never had the tools to keep it at that temperature and someone reports to me that she does and they were funky. Eeww. I’d probably cook them up anyway, but who wants to deal with funky? (I may try to reproduce it because now I’m curious.) In any case, I start my soak water out pretty warm and then don’t worry about it until I add more water. When the beans have soaked up most of their water, I add more and I add it at a pretty high temperature. In the winter I’m sure it’s down to 40 degrees in about three minutes in our century-old historic brothel, but I can’t really worry about that. I eat beans and enjoy them regardless.
If you would like to read more than a ramble, go to the article at the Rebuild site on soaking beans. It has the graphs you see in the soaking beans video below (plus an extra or two).
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