Using the Ol’ Bean

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.

A team of researchers from Washington State University, Pullman, WA, and the USDA Agricultural Research Service in Albany, CA, has produced puffed legume snacks using extrusion technology and a water-based slurry of pea and lentil flours, starches, fiber and other functional ingredients. The team’s procedure solves a problem that had plagued earlier attempts to extrude legumes—namely, their high protein content—with the general protein content of the pulses, including peas, chickpeas and lentils, running somewhere in the 20% to 30% range. “Whenever you deal with high protein, then you’ve got a problem,” explains Juming “Jimmy” Tang, Ph.D., part of the food engineering group in the university’s department of biological systems engineering. “It won’t expand very well. It becomes gummy inside the extruder barrel.” But the ingredient combination and process they use achieves a range of puff sizes—they’ve managed 20-fold expansion—while keeping costs attractively low. And because the entire process takes place in the extruder, “You don’t need to prefry,” Tang adds. “You don’t need a lot of oil or stuff, just the raw ingredients and a certain amount of water.”

Tang compares the products they’ve made to standard puffed breakfast cereals. “We can make snack balls, too,” he adds, as well as what he describes as a “nugget shape.” And, whereas breakfast cereals made with the pea and lentil puffs might do well with a sweet coating, the extruded snacks suit themselves to savory applications, too. Tang foresees cheese, curry, chile spice and similar flavor profiles.

Flour power

Indian cooks have developed a lengthy repertoire of bean snacks using ground bean and pea flours. One of the more famous examples is dosa, which Aliza Green, author of “The Bean Bible: A Legumaniac’s Guide to Lentils, Peas, and Every Edible Bean on the Planet,” describes as “large, lacy, ground split-pea and rice pancakes flavored with onions, cilantro and fresh ginger.” Other dal-flour flatbreads include the crispy lentil wafers called pappdum, and dhokla, a ginger- and chile-seasoned treat made from a chickpea-flour batter that’s been steamed and cut into squares.

Green loves using chickpea flour for its nutty flavor, and her book gives recipes for chickpea-flour pizza; a chickpea version of the German dumplings, spätzle; and a traditional cookie from Tunisia. Chickpea flour also winds up in the South of France, where it’s the basis for two regional specialties: panisse and socca. To make the former, which resembles a French fry, chefs cook the chickpea batter polenta-style, spread it onto the surface of an oiled pan, and then cut it into strips for frying. Green likes to sprinkle her panisse with salt, pepper and Parmesan cheese and shoot them under the broiler for extra flavor. As for socca, also called socca niçoise after its Provençal provenance, it’s a thin tart made from chickpea flour.

Picking the right bean

Practical processing considerations often dictate bean choice. Janelle Sterner, research and development chef, Inland Empire Foods, Inc., Riverside, CA, asks some critical questions about the product to narrow the options: “Under what conditions must the ingredient perform? What is the target appearance of the final product? How will the other ingredients in the system interact? Will they compete for water, or change the pH?”

And what type of processing need the beans withstand? Fortunately for processors, legumes as a whole exhibit considerable resiliency in processed foods. Take the retort process: While it can play havoc with more delicate ingredients, it leaves beans virtually undamaged. But, as Brian Yager, corporate research chef, ADM, Decatur, IL, warns, “They can still be overcooked and overprocessed.” When they are, the first things to go are texture and appearance. “So if the beans get overcooked, then you’ll have problems with loss of identity and pumpability,” he says.

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 at kim@decker.net .

Bean Nutrients

Source: USDA National Nutrient Database for Standard Reference, Release 16

Web Resources

Beans for Health Alliance

USA Dry Pea & Lentil Council

Bean/Cowpea Collaborative Research Support Program (CRSP)

Spilling the Beans on Legumes

Additional Resources

Bean products 

Lentils

Pea ingredients