Because they are a low-cost dietary staple around the globe, the humble bean has not gotten a lot of flashy headlines in the United States. But not only are they ubiquitous in popular ethnic dishes, they have a gourmet side, too: Think French cassoulet, a casserole of white beans, meats, vegetables and herbs that you’ll find in the toniest restaurants. Plus, Mother Nature has packed a lot of nutrition and not too many calories into those little legumes: A half cup of cooked dry beans serves up about 6 grams of fiber, but weighs in at only 120 calories. Beans contain significant levels of heart-healthy folate with no cholesterol, are virtually fat-free and, unless sodium is added during canning, are low in sodium.
Maybe best of all for the product developer, hundreds of varieties, from little vividly colored adzukis to the more-substantial pale, creamy lima bean, and an array of useful forms give lots of design leeway in everything from main dishes to sides and from snacks to dips.
Snackable beans
We’ve embraced beans as a snack dip in the slightly exotic form of hummus, but what about beans as the snack themselves? Most bean snacks are decidedly low-tech—all you need to make them is a sturdy skillet and a good stove. Snack manufacturers, however, have figured out how to produce a whole lot more of these treats than you could get out of your own kitchen. First, they soak the dried legumes—usually peas, chickpeas or lentils. In the case of peas, sodium bicarbonate in the soaking water brightens their green color and, by combining with acids in the peas, acts as a sort of leavening agent to produce a lighter finished texture. Once the legumes’ moisture content reaches around 50%, they go into the fryer until their moisture content drops back down to about 2.0% to 2.5%. Manufacturers take pains to monitor the oil’s temperature during the process, starting off at the lower end of the scale and gradually raising the heat. As a rule, if you begin frying the legumes at too high a temperature, you risk blistering and rupturing their skins; fry them too gently, however, and you increase both the frying time and the amount of oil the peas absorb. Lentils, being less susceptible to thermal shock and small enough to fry quickly, are the exception. However, because of their high surface-area-to-volume ratio, their surfaces adsorb quite a bit of oil, prompting snack manufacturers to run the fried lentils through a centrifuge in order to dislodge it.