On food and cooking the science and lore of the kitchen ( PDFDrive ) 933

both the taste and texture of the cooked beans The alkalinity of baking soda can give an unpleasantly slippery mouth feel and soapy taste And salt reduces the swelling and gelation of starch granules within beans, which means that it favors a mealy internal texture over a creamy one Pressure Cooking Thanks to its temperature of around 250ºF/120ºC, pressure cooking can cut the cooking time of beans and peas by half or more Salt-presoaked beans may take just 10 minutes Persistently Hard Beans One problem that cooks commonly encounter when cooking dry beans is that some batches take unusually long to soften, or never quite soften This may have been caused by growing conditions on the farm, or storage conditions after harvest “Hard-seed” is a characteristic found in beans when temperatures are high and humidity and water supply are low during the growing season The outer seed coat gets very water-resistant, so it takes much longer for water to move into the bean interior Hardseed beans are usually smaller than normal beans, so they can sometimes be avoided by picking over the beans and discarding the smallest ones before cooking “Hard-to-cook” beans, on the other hand, are normal when harvested, but become resistant to softening when they’re stored for a long time — months — at warm temperatures and high humidities This resistance results from a number of changes in bean cell walls and interiors, including the formation of woody lignin, the conversion of phenolic compounds into tannins that crosslink proteins, and the denaturation of storage proteins to form a water-resistant coating around the starch granules There’s no way to reverse these changes and make hard-to-cook beans as soft as regular beans And there’s no way to spot them before cooking Once ... picking over the beans and discarding the smallest ones before cooking “Hard-to-cook” beans, on the other hand, are normal when harvested, but become resistant to softening when they’re stored for a long time — months — at warm... a long time — months — at warm temperatures and high humidities This resistance results from a number of changes in bean cell walls and interiors, including the formation of woody lignin, the conversion of. .. phenolic compounds into tannins that crosslink proteins, and the denaturation of storage proteins to form a water-resistant coating around the starch granules There’s no way to reverse these changes and make hard-to-cook beans as soft as regular beans