Dried Beans

Dried beans are the protein of the bucket store: cheap, dense, and good for up to 10 years in a sealed container and 20 to 30 in Mylar with an oxygen absorber beside the rice. A pound is about 1,500 calories and 100 grams of protein, and beans and rice together make the complete protein that neither has alone. The one thing age does to a bean is make it slow to soften, and the second half of this page is about cooking the old ones.

Pinto, black, navy, kidney, great northern and chickpeas are the stock beans; split peas and lentils cook without soaking and have their own page. Buy from a supplier that turns stock over, in 25 or 50 pound bags, and pack them the week they arrive; beans that sat in a warm warehouse for a year are already harder to cook. Mixed sizes from one bag cook unevenly; keep kinds separate.

Cool, dark and dry, in something airtight. The original bag or box is fine for the months you will use it in; for the years, the answer is the same as for rice: a Mylar bag with an oxygen absorber inside a food-grade bucket, which keeps out oxygen, moisture, light and every insect egg that came home from the mill. The Mylar ranking says which foods take an absorber and which do not.

A 5 gallon bucket holds about 35 pounds of beans. Beans are dry enough for an absorber. Keep them cool: beans stored warm lose the ability to soak up water and turn into the hard beans that never soften, which is a storage problem, not a safety one.

Look for mold, webbing, holes or beetles and smell for mustiness; any of those and the bag goes. Beans that are sound but old have faded color and a wrinkled skin, and they will take longer to cook. The test for an old lot is to soak and cook a cup: if it softens, the lot is good; if it stays rock-hard after a long simmer, the lot is for the pressure cooker and the grinder, not the stew pot.

A cup of dry beans makes about three cups cooked and is three servings; plan on a pound per person per week with the rice. Soak overnight in three times their volume of water (or boil two minutes and let stand an hour), drain, and simmer 1 to 2 hours in fresh water with the salt added at the end. For old beans: a quarter teaspoon of baking soda per quart of soaking water softens the skins, and a pressure cooker brings a 2 hour bean to 30 minutes; beans that still will not soften grind into flour for soups and refried beans. Never eat kidney beans raw or undercooked; ten minutes at a full boil destroys the toxin before the simmer.

Beans are the fuel-hungry staple, which is why the canned ones are on the shelf for the first weeks. A thermal cooker or a pot wrapped in blankets after a ten minute boil finishes beans with almost no fuel, and a solar cooker does it on a clear day. Soak them the night before every time.

Shelf-life figures are from the Survival Foods field guide; fridge, freezer and pantry times are from the USDA cold and pantry storage charts. Run the look, smell, taste check before eating anything past its date.