The functional benefits of bean and pea flours include the capacity to retain moisture in products. And, adds Yager, because these flours contain the whole bean and nothing more, they deliver all the nutritional advantages of their parent ingredients. That means no gluten allergens and the bean’s full complement of protein, fiber, vitamins and minerals. He also points out a recent study that found that cake doughnuts made with bean powder underwent less oil migration into the cake than standard doughnuts.
The U.S.A. Dry Pea & Lentil Council, Moscow, ID, hopes to learn more about the potential for using pulse-based blends “as high-protein raw materials in various types of baked foods,” says Peter Klaiber, director of marketing for the group. The group will field-test products made with fortified pea-rice, lentil-rice, and chickpea-rice blends—developed as alternatives to corn-soy and wheat-soy blends—in Indonesia. Also in Indonesia, the Council and partner Land O’ Lakes, Arden Hills, MN, will test a fortified pea-and-rice beverage for school lunch programs and eventual commercial sale. The pea-and-rice combination provides complete protein, while additional fortification supplies iron, vitamin A, calcium (by way of nonfat dry milk), and “vegetable oil for calories, because students in developing countries often lack energy due to low caloric intake,” says Klaiber. “Beverages destined for school lunches have a sweet flavor profile, “but formulations have also been made with savory flavoring, including chicken, shallot, onion and mushroom.”
Concerns about appearance, among other things, leave some product developers reluctant to work with quick-cooking beans. “They think ‘instant’ or ‘dehydrated’ and, immediately, they think that there’s a loss of integrity, flavor, nutrients, etc.,” Yager says. But, advances in legume processing have yielded quick-cooking ingredients that escape those usual concerns while also relieving manufacturers from the burdensome soaking and cooking times associated with traditional bean cuisine. His company manufactures a dehydrated whole bean that, in as little as 10 minutes, he says, “goes from a dry bean to a cooked ‘salad state,’ in that the appearance and the integrity are still there. There’s no soaking, there’s no blanching, you don’t have the waste-water disposal problems—all of those things you have to go through when preparing a raw, dried bean, you no longer have to deal with.”
Yager says that processors can also work with suppliers to tailor a bean’s cook time to a particular processing protocol. This opens the door for the production of multibean mixes that might have been impossible when some of the beans in the blend would otherwise cook in a matter of minutes while the rest would require upward of an hour.
Be it ever so humble, the versatile bean deserves some respect.
Kimberly J. Decker, a California-based technical writer, has a B.S. in Consumer Food Science with a minor in English from the University of California, Davis. She lives in the San Francisco Bay area, where she enjoys eating and writing about food. You can reach her atkim@decker.net.