#129 – The Science Behind Properly Prepared Beans (and how to do it at home!)

Beans, Beans, the magical fruit, the more you eat, the more you absorb valuable minerals and proteins, improve your cardiovascular function and the health of your arterial walls as well as cholesterol and fat absorption, boost your digestion and gut bacteria health, and enjoy an array of bright and colorful foods – but what about that other, turbulent side benefit?

In this explosive episode, we will break down, like an enzyme breaks down an oligosaccharide, the compounds in beans and the processes in your body that can cause the possible noxious side benefits, as well as what ancestral peoples did to deal with this – aside from cracking ancient jokes that never get old. We will discuss in detail a patented process purported to eliminate ALL of the potentially thunderous side-effects using only water, time and heat, and we will additionally talk about herbs that can be cooked or served alongside beans to quell the claps of cheeky applause.

There is a copious amount of additional material that I could only include in the show notes for reasons of being too inappropriate to read on air, and they can be found on our website, ancestralkitchenpodcast.com by clicking the Episodes drop-down. I tested the absolute technology limits with the length of show notes today and ran out of room on our podcast apps, so go and enjoy the mountains of links and additional text I put there for you to enjoy.

In this episode I hope you will find the critical information you need to understand the possible pitfalls of beans and where those pitfalls come from, and leave feeling confident in how to deal with them and enjoy not only beans, but all their benefits – and none of their possible sound effects. Researching this episode left me all the more in awe of the incredible, ancient value beans bring to our diet, and more determined than ever to include them in a variety of meals across the week without what the Bard called any “strange eruptions”.

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• Early Sumerian humor!

“Something which has never occurred since time immemorial; a young woman did not fart in her husband’s lap.” Somebody took the time to inscribe that on a clay tablet. It makes me wonder what types of ribald humor they didn’t take the time to inscribe?! Sumerian Jokes

• Ancient Norse humor The Ancient Norse were incredibly humorous. They have so many jokes and sly remarks in their prose and poetry that is downright hilarious to read today. I cannot think of any ancient text more rife with inappropriate humor than the Norse stories and poems (and believe me, many ancient texts and medieval manuscripts are full of it all!).

The Lokasenna is Loki’s Taunts, a scene where he taunts all the gods and their wives and children in Othin’s great hall. The things he says are shocking and so inappropriate that even modern translators don’t translate the words accurately but use euphemisms that are more tolerable to read – and since they aren’t aimed at us, they are laugh-out-loud funny to read at times. Some of them are believed to refer to other sagas and stories that no longer survived, as others allude to situations we have read somewhat about in other places. All in all, it is fascinating work! In Stanza 32, Loki is taunting Freyja and says, “Silence, Freyja./You are a witch,/and have dealt out many curses./I hear the gods found you/lying with your brother,/and that you farted then, Freyja./” This translation is from The Poetic Edda: Stories of the Norse Gods and Heroes, translated and edited by Jackson Crawford.

• Shakespearean Humor

Yes, the bard included many a sly fart joke in his writings. Here are a few:

The Comedy of Errors

Dromio: A man may break a word with you, sir, and words are but wind

Ay, and break it in your face, so he break it not behind.

Othello

CLOWN: Are these, I pray you, wind instruments?

FIRST MUSICIAN: Ay marry are they, sir.

CLOWN: O, thereby hangs a tail.

FIRST MUSICIAN: Whereby hangs a tail, sir?

CLOWN: Marry, sir, by many a wind instrument that I know.

There are plenty more. Have fun making note of them!

• My summary of the patented process detailed in WAPF article: In summary – Fresh beans ideal (under 4 months old, but certainly under 13 months). STEP 1 Cover in soft (pH 6.5 to 9) water 4x bean’s weight at 120F, 49C. Rehydrate one to six hours depending on bean’s size (make notes on beans that split, to help you know. Send us your notes, we will compile them all!). Drain the beans of the soaking water. STEP 2: Put in fresh (soft) water at 147F/64C. Let them soak at this temp (!? Maybe use a cooler like we do for yoghurt?), 2 to 6 hours depending on beans size, changing the water two to three times. At the end of this period, move on to canning or cooking.
• Brittney’s instructions: Step one: Rancho Gordo. Step two: The absolute best way to cook beans is as follows – in any Dutch oven or just a ceramic crock with lid, put in your beans then fill about 1.25” with water past where the beans are. Add a lot of salt, like 2 teaspoons or so and any other seasonings, but all you need is salt.

Bake at 325 with lid on for 1.5 hrs minimum, could take up to 3 depending on age and type of bean.

You will never eat a boiled bean again in your life.

I do try to soak my beans (even a short soak can still help), but this method works just fine without if you’re short on time and I find they don’t make me gassy this way? It’s magic.

If you like fancy beans check out Rancho Gordo

It may not soak up all the cooking water. I check at the 1.5 hour mark and then recover with water if necessary and determine if I need to cook longer, from there I check it every 30 mins or so. I usually make them to be ready a bit before I actually need them and just leave them covered on the stove top and they stay warm a long time. I try to have the water level at least 1”-1.25” over the top of the layer of beans but if you had a deeper Dutch oven you could definitely just add more water to begin with. You just want everything submerged while cooking or you’ll get wrinkly bean skin on top. I usually just test a bean and taste one to see if they’ve cooked through! If they are fresher and have been soaked I find they are ready around 1.5 hrs. I have cooked some really large beans that took longer and some that weren’t soaked can take closer to 2-3 hours.

• Brittney’s instructions for black beans: I usually try to soak, then drain & rinse…then follow the cooking method below BUT you don’t have to if you cook them in a Dutch oven or a bakeware with a lid. 325 – cover the beans with water – should be about 1.25” water above the beans. Heavily salt. 2-3 tsp. Bay leaves. Onions. Garlic. Whatever else you want. Can do just salt though! Bake for 1.5-4 hours – this is where soaking helps with cook time (also digestibility) but start checking at 1.5 hrs then every 30 min or so. If it goes a long time you may need to add water at some point to keep the beans covered.
• My additional notes on Rancho Gordo that didn’t make it into the episode!

The Bean Book (published by Ten Speed Press) is their cookbook

Steve Sando – started raising and selling heirloom varieties of beans

People weren’t impressed and thought he charged too high

A chef from French Laundry found his table and was amazed

Chef commented the beans were sold new – picked, dried and sold in the same year. This produces the greatest consistency he had ever seen

Unique varieties in India, Mexico and other places

A bean club with 26,000 members and 22,000 waitlisted

Many offers from big companies to buy Rancho Gordo but Steve doesn’t want to sell – he wants it to stay a good place to work, a good environment, good jobs

Resources:

Check the show notes for this episode on https://ancestralkitchenpodcast.com/category/podcast/. Additional show note material doubles the content you see here! On the website you will also see the ancestral jokes alluded to in the episode, as well as the newspaper clippings from the Duke of Windsor’s wedding including the advertisement for bile beans!

Corned Beef recipe

How long have humans been eating beans?

The Story of Beans in Mexican Cuisine

Karen Hurd’s research on beans and bile – story starts at about 8 minutes in

London Musem bile beans

Bacteroides thetaiotaomicron utilization of RFO (raffinose family oligosaccharides)

What is Raffinose?

Article about Steve Sando and Rancho Gordo (behind a paywall, but new viewers are allowed an article or two before paying)

Sumerian Jokes

Ancient Anatolian bread

The Rise and Fall of Çatalhöyük: A Neolithic Matriarchy?

Neolithic Site of Çatalhöyük

Did Vikings and ancient Norse peoples eat beans?

When were potatoes introduced to England?

Does epazote reduce gassiness?

Epazote seeds from Mountain Rose Herbs (organic)

Yerba Santa

Fonda san Miguel

What do digestive bitters do?

What does epazote do to beans? “Epazote’s ability to reduce gas production is thought to be due to its carminative properties. Carminatives are ingredients that help to relieve gas and bloating in the digestive system. Epazote’s carminative properties are believed to work by reducing the amount of gas produced by bacteria in the large intestine. This is achieved through the inhibition of the growth of gas-producing bacteria, as well as the reduction of the amount of oligosaccharides that are fermented. As a result, epazote can help to reduce the discomfort and bloating associated with eating beans.”

Other carminative herbs

More carminative herbs

Sources – Garden Treasures (they do not sell online), Rancho Gordo, Hodmedods

Pressure canning book

Soaking beans

WAPF article on soaking beans

Don’t use hard water to soak beans

Rancho Gordo recipes on their website

The Best Hummus (it really is! The process is magic)

 

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Transcript:

Alison:
Hello Andrea hello.

Andrea:
Alison how are you how are you feeling today welcome back.

Alison:
Thank you thank you yeah I’m my voice as you may be able to hear is still a little bit dodgy but I’m hoping we can I’m so looking forward to this episode and I know how much you’ve got to say because I’ve seen the notes so I’m like I’m I’m here for this one um yeah I am listeners won’t know that I just got back from a week at a long-time supporter and listener, Nicole’s House in Italy, which was absolutely wonderful. And she was very excited that we were going to do a Beans episode on Tuesday. She said, oh, I’m so excited. It’s been so long. Everyone wants a Beans episode. So I’m okay. Yeah. How are you?

Andrea:
I am well, and I’m hoping that the beans deliver what people are asking for.

Alison:
I think they will.

Andrea:
There’s a lot of research in here. Anybody listening has already checked the show notes. It’s a very long bibliography of things that they’re going to have to go through. So I put most all my resources in the show notes, so there’s a lot of them.

Alison:
You know, when the podcasts go across to YouTube, because we have them, at the moment we have audio automatically going to YouTube, youtube’s only got a certain number of um characters in its um like show notes section and every month it says your podcast is too long we’ve got to cut these things out of the show notes i’m like.

Andrea:
Whatever whatever hey we are the podcast with epic show notes allison i do not like when i listen to podcasts and they say we’ll put it in the show notes and then you look in the show and there’s nothing and so i i do what i wish they would do and i put everything in the show so it’s a lot so it’s um it’s.

Alison:
Early in the morning for you have you had some breakfast.

Andrea:
I did actually i had a splendid breakfast uh as of the recording of this episode we’re fairly close to saint patrick’s day and my sister and i had a splendid saint patrick’s day feast that we prepared for our families and we corned three briskets of ours and i will i will put the recipe in the show notes it was delicious and so i actually had leftover corned beef i had boiled cabbage potatoes parsnips and carrots for breakfast and then i made myself a earl gray, latte so early gray honey and some milk and let me tell you if i’m a little extra lively today it’s because i had some.

Alison:
Food it’s good wow did you eat yeah i did before i tell you i eat i just need to cough and that wasn’t actually a cough that was a cough for my tea going down the wrong way, okay let me write down the time stamp hopefully that won’t happen again, yeah so i did eat um a kind of easy food today my usual let’s cook up two chicken carcasses because i buy chicken carcasses in in a pack of two put them in to make meat stock this morning for an hour and a half and then pick the chicken off and half of it fed us for lunch just straight chicken on the plate and the other half is in the fridge for tomorrow to make risotto um but today we ate straight meat which was delicious with some steamed kale and always had a bread that was % spelt % rye and I had my gluten-free that I’m making with some lard and some salt simple and lovely.

Andrea:
That’s perfect.

Alison:
I’m hoping later in the year to do a seven things to do with a chicken carcass episode in which I will talk more at length about, you know, the routine I have.

Andrea:
You are contracted into that now because ever since you mentioned it on an episode a while ago, people have said to me, I can’t wait for that seven things to do with a chicken carcass episode.

Alison:
So that’s got to come.

Andrea:
No wiggling out.

Alison:
No, exactly. Exactly. So tell us a bit about why we’re doing this episode on beans, because I know that there’s been some chat on Discord about it, hasn’t there?

Andrea:
That is why. The Discord made me do it. The conversation around beans comes up fairly frequently. Either people don’t like them or people don’t know how to cook them or people want to know, is there an ancestral way to prepare them or are we doing something wrong? Along so many times when you eat beans from the store, you’re like, I don’t know about this situation. And so it feels like something is off and people are very right in their estimation. So I’m hoping we can answer all those questions and put all the concerns to rest with this episode.

Alison:
Great, great. Okay. So before we start, and I sort of, I know I can feel I’m holding you back from getting to all the good stuff. Let me just do two things. The first one is read a wonderful review we’ve had from debsu on apple i.

Andrea:
Always have time to hear that.

Alison:
Which is five star do please go and leave us a five star review there are details in the show notes how to do it if you’re on apple and this review is titled lovely and actionable and debsu says i began listening to this podcast one year ago and in that time i’ve made % rye sourdough bread sauerkraut tibikos liver beef and lamb heart and so much more all for the first time i love how practical you both are with clear steps we can take towards a more ancestral kitchen and lifestyle it feels so much like i have you here with me in my kitchen cheering me on thank you for thank you for all of the love and care you have put into this podcast, Thank you, Deb.

Andrea:
Wow. That’s a lovely thing to say. My eyes were wide. That is a long list of things and all for the first time. And in a year.

Alison:
That’s incredible, isn’t that?

Andrea:
Gracious. Wasting no time. Well, we are with you in your kitchen today.

Alison:
Do something else for the first time yeah exactly um there’s one more thing that i want to tick off before we get started it’s about the newsletter so we have from our base over here we have two newsletters going out semi-regularly the first one is from me um at ancestral kitchen and that generally goes out once every two weeks and then there’s another newsletter from the podcast, which Andrea at the moment is in charge of. And that has been going out about once a month, usually at the end of the month. Now, I’ve had some people tell me that they’ve signed up for either or both of the newsletters, but they’re not getting them. So based on the frequency that I just told you, if you think you haven’t heard from us and you should have, do check your spam. Also if you’re on Gmail they have a promotions tab check that you know there’s only there’s a whole like thing hidden behind a curtain as to what why things get put in spam and why things get put in promotions tab and and there is really only so much we can do you know we can try our best to make sure they get to your inboxes but often they don’t and that’s out of our hands so if you notice that you haven’t got them do have a look in the places where they might be hiding move them back into your inbox most email providers have a safe sender section you could put our email addresses in there um the other way to potentially get those emails into your inbox not your spam is to hit reply and just type something in there like i’m doing this to try and get these into my inbox and we’ll know not you know that it’s not an emergency and we don’t need to do anything and that might mean that in the future they come to your inbox and but do know we are sending emails out and telling you all the wonderful things that are going on. So if you haven’t got them, do have a nose around and see if you can find them somewhere else.

Andrea:
Yes please save us from the spam and promotions folder you want to be main inbox friends.

Alison:
Indeed okay that that’s my admin over.

Andrea:
Andrea okay well then onwards and upwards we don’t have i don’t know i guess i could put my notes in as a download i’ve thought about doing that it’s pages so maybe but um we don’t really have any official downloads for this episode but do check the show notes on the website because speaking of things that don’t fit in the apps information box i had some pictures and extra chunks of text that i couldn’t put in the actual show notes in the podcast player so i took advantage of our website and they’re in the show notes on the website so if ever we say something is in the show notes by the way and you think you can’t find it, make sure if we said it’s on the website. Some stuff doesn’t work in the podcast players, but check our website, ancestralkitchenpodcast.com. We have all of our show notes there and usually a little more than what you can see on the app. So, yeah.

Andrea:
All right. So this is kind of how today’s going to look, Allison. We’ll talk about beans and ancestral food. And as I said, there’s some things going to be in the show notes. Some of them I’m not putting on air because they’re actually inappropriate. So you’re going to have to check the show notes to see them. And then there’s, I want to talk about beans for health. Are they just for protein or what are they doing for us? And then I want to talk about how to properly prepare beans. And I’m going to share with you guys a patented process, which is easily done at home.

Andrea:
Where the patenters claim that all of the gas-producing compounds are removed from the beans by preparation from this method, which has its roots in ancestral practices. So we’ll see. We shall see. So let’s hear first from today’s sponsor, and then I’ll get started with the known history of beans.

Andrea:
How far back do we have documentation of people eating legumes generally so i’ll say beans today but we’re kind of capturing beans lentils and peas underneath that entire umbrella and what did ancestral peoples do with beans well there’s interesting results when you look up, how long ago did people eat beans, and I ended up going down long rabbit trails, including long YouTube videos and scholarly articles and archaeology reports, which is quite fun, actually. I enjoyed myself doing that. So here’s some of the things, and some of what I’m going to say might somewhat conflict with the other. Everybody wants to claim they’re the first and the oldest and greatest of everything. So we do have evidence of people eating beans in Thailand at least , years ago.

Alison:
Okay.

Andrea:
And then some historians say beans were first domesticated in Mesoamerica about , years ago, making them one of the earliest cultivated crops we know of. Interestingly, one thing you run into with everything from invention to literacy and writing and different technologies like that, when you start looking at history, you find it seems like in multiple continents, at the same time, things were kind of being invented or discovered or used. And so sometimes you might say, well, this place was doing it first, but this place was also doing it about then. You know, maybe they all independently discovered or invented something.

Alison:
Well, it’s interesting to me that you say Mesoamerica, because obviously, you know, when we think about the first domestication, my mind goes to grains. And I think about the Middle East, you know, the Fertile Crescent. So I was expecting you to say the Fertile Crescent was the first place. But no, really across the waters in Mesoamerica, it’s really interesting. I wonder whether it was similar in the Fertile Crescent around the same time or not, like you said, perhaps it was.

Andrea:
Well, I do have something interesting that might, it doesn’t disagree with what you’re saying. So let me read a few more interesting tidbits. And again, some of the links that I used are in the show notes for this. So if you want to watch a cool video, you too can watch it. Wild fava beans were gathered in afghanistan and the himalayan foothills in ancient days and there’s a quote that says the first cultivated beans appeared years ago in the aegean iberia and trans-alpine europe and they were large seeded broad beans now you notice that this now directly disagrees with what i just said about mesoamerica yeah um so you know uh experts disagree. Theories and theses are different, but, We’re seeing a trend. They’ve been around for a minute. If you listened to our Ancestral Pantry episode, you heard us refer to Egyptian lentils, and then like what Alison, you were saying, Sumerian lentils. And in Anatolia, in southern Turkey, there’s a UNESCO site called Çapıholuk. Yes, I have watched a bunch of videos to figure out how to say that. Sometimes referred to as the oldest village in the world.

Alison:
Wow.

Andrea:
This is a place we could spend a lot of time learning. They have found some very fascinating things there, Alison, related to food. But they’ve unearthed levels of Neolithic occupation from between about BC to BC. And they have bread, which was baked, they believe, around BC, which, remember you have to add that plus the Anodomini years, so years. So there’s traces of emmer and lentils in that bread And it was also baked at a lower heat About C or F So I’m imagining it was probably a very dense, harder bread Kind of sounds satisfying and rich And then peas reigned supreme in Britain And the famous potato wasn’t introduced to our Anglo friends until about the late s, and it did come from Mesoamerica. And it was not well-received at first. Well, it came first to Ireland, and then it didn’t come across the water very well, largely due most likely to xenophobia, because people didn’t want things associated with people they had a beef with. So…

Andrea:
The trend we see is it’s been around for a bit, and we have archaeological remains of beans, fava beans, lentils in things way, way back. Did ancestral people have any issues digesting beans? This is where you need to please go to the website show notes, because I want to tell you this, but I’m not going to say it on air. So, the oldest known ancestral joke may have to do with the consumption of beans. So, please see the show notes.

Alison:
We have to do that. We have to do an episode about old ancestral jokes now.

Andrea:
Don’t we? Yes. This joke was inscribed on a clay tablet by the Sumerians. And they actually had a couple of jokes written down. So… What I would say is when you read this old joke, you will realize that the modern sense of humor has not evolved at all. We haven’t changed.

Alison:
You think about clay tablets and you think they have such gravity to them. And it’s a clay tablet. I’ve just finished reading a fiction book, which I think is called There Are Rivers in the Sky, which was all about kind of southern Turkey and down further into the Veltide Crescent. And about a guy who worked in Victorian London and came up from the slums to work for the British Museum and was decoding tablets from the region, clay tablets. And it’s an absolutely fascinating book, learned so much. But I think of all of the things that he was reading on these clay tablets and one of them was the Epic of Gilgamesh.

Andrea:
Oh, gosh.

Alison:
All these amazing things. But also, there were bean jokes on there as well.

Andrea:
So, yeah, it just, it made me laugh because, you know, we love to pass around our, you know, funny memes and jokes that we send to each other. And that ain’t new, folks. That is not new. The ancient Norse people also appear to have enjoyed beans and lentils. I came at this one backwards because I read something in the Lokasena, which is a poem or Loki’s song in the poetic Edda. And I thought, wait a minute, do they eat beans? So that was reverse engineered information. And yes, indeed, they did appear to bake beans and lentils into their breads. And I have put that joke in the show notes on the website as well.

Alison:
So we have to go and see them.

Andrea:
I know.

Alison:
I think the beans and lentils in bread was a very strong thing in the UK too, probably later than this. But, you know, when there wasn’t enough flour around or just to stretch the flour full stop, then peas were put in bread. It was just something that was normal. And we’ve kind of stepped away from that now with our wheat and our abundance of things. We don’t really feel the need to put those lentils or those peas in bread. But it was a very common thing to do back a few thousand years ago, I think.

Andrea:
Just the other day. Yeah, it does seem quite common. And in fact, there was a conversation in Discord where one of our supporters said, I do not like beans. It’s a sensory issue with me and I really want to have them in my diet. And some amazing suggestions came up, including ways to, I think I put the recipes in the show notes actually, but ways to incorporate beans into things such as baking them into breads and brownies and things like that. So, you know, if you really want beans, you can prepare them according to the method we’ll discuss today. And then you could blend them or grind them into breads and white moths. So then there’s this interesting little piece of history called bile beans. And this journey for me started with our supporter, Rebecca, who shared actually in Ireland. And she shared a story in Discord. She was talking about a person named Karen Hurd, who was interviewed in a podcast episode. Check the show notes. I’ll put the link in there. And after listening to her, Rebecca actually was so inspired with the importance of beans that she started cooking with them more, including, as I said, putting them into brownies. So here’s a story that Rebecca shared, which I’ll kind of share in Brave A. She said Karen had a young child or baby who became mysteriously ill.

Andrea:
Nobody could help her, and it seemed the baby was going to die. So she used to work in the military in chemical warfare, and she recognized that the baby had been poisoned. Now, I am paraphrasing Rebecca’s paraphrase, so if I got some of these details off, just listen to the episode. The story of Karen starts at right about eight minutes into the episode, if we want to hear it completely. So she, knowing the baby had been poisoned, she then learned that people had been treated in their house for insects or treating the house for insects. And they’d used a hundred times the amount of insecticide you’re supposed to. And the baby had been crawling on that treated carpet. So she went digging in libraries to learn about a cure. And she learned about how our bodies naturally recycle our bile. This is very bad for the baby because the bile was full of the chemicals it needed to get rid of. and the chemicals were just circulating around and around. So introduce beans. They have a special type of fiber that binds to bile and carries it out of your body. This would happen, Rebecca was thinking, that was at the end of the small intestine, which would line up with what we’re going to share with you today. With a full effect, don’t eat much fat with the beans, otherwise the bean fiber will bind to the fat instead.

Andrea:
But by this, I also infer if you want to eat a lot of fat, but you don’t need all of the energy from the fat, eat it with your beans. So she would literally blend beans and squirt it into the baby’s mouth and the baby fully recovered. So Rebecca says, I like to imagine my bile being refreshed when I eat beans. Well, I love that. And this is so funny, Alice. And you know that phenomenon when you learn a word and suddenly you see it everywhere?

Alison:
Everywhere, yeah, yeah. Yep.

Andrea:
Well, just a few days after Rebecca shared this astonishing story, I was, don’t ask why, but for some reason I was looking up for King Edward VIII and I wanted to see.

Alison:
He’s just obsessed with the English monarchy, that’s why.

Andrea:
Yeah, I can say. So, we were like, we want a king. That’s my diagnosis. Can we read about yours, please? So, King Edward VIII was the king who abdicated the throne and then because of that, his brother became the king of England and then successively, very shortly after, you had Queen Elizabeth, who had the longest reign. and history. So there was a front page newspaper spread called Duke of Windsor Weds. This was when he had already abdicated and he wedded Wallace Simpson. I was less interested in the pictures of the -pound Wallace Simpson and the -pound Duke of Windsor than I was by the picture at the bottom of the newspaper, which is an advertisement for bile beans. I was like, wait a minute.

Alison:
Oh, my gosh.

Andrea:
Where have I read this before?

Alison:
Wow.

Andrea:
I actually put the pictures of this newspaper in the show notes on the website. I can’t put pictures in the podcast player, but I can put them on the website. So the ad starts out with the captivating title, How Will You Look in a Swimsuit? So… I went looking, and I found in the show notes, again, I put this link, the London Museum website has an old advertisement for bile beans, keep you healthy, slim, and attractive, the medically tested laxative.

Alison:
Oh, my gosh. Oh, my gosh.

Andrea:
I know. I’m selling everybody on this. So, I don’t know if that doesn’t inspire you to eat beans. Like, what will? So, that was crazy enough. And then I wanted to read you some excerpts from the Weston A. Price’s description of legumes.

Alison:
Okay.

Andrea:
And I’m going to give mad credit to Catherine Chapp, I think is how you might pronounce her last name. She wrote this article, which I’m going to reference again at the end of the episode with the incredible information about beans. And she did a very good job on this article. She said the high-protein content of legume seeds makes them a potential source of high-quality nourishment with impressive stores of minerals, including magnesium, potassium, phosphorus, iron, molybdenum, as well as B vitamins such as folate and thiamine. All legumes contain both omega- and omega- fatty acids. Kidney and pinto beans are particularly high in omega-. There seems to be fairly high content of both soluble and insoluble fiber in legumes.

Andrea:
And then she said there’s also the contribution of legumes to our cardiovascular health is not just from the benefit of those binders, but also the potassium magnesium minerals, which we need. Now, Allison, you and I are also going to talk about phytates in this episode. So keep in mind that I said that beans bring us a lot of minerals.

Andrea:
The potassium and the magnesium is not only vital for normal functioning of your cardiovascular system it also helps to regulate your blood pressure as well as electrical impulses remember electrolytes of nerves and muscles including the heart contraction so with all of those amazing nutrients, there is also the benefit that the B vitamins convert homocysteine in the bloodstream into innocuous forms. And homocysteine is a natural byproduct of protein metabolism, but it can damage arterial walls and is a marker of heart disease with much more predictive value than serum cholesterol levels, so you’re getting minerals, you’re getting protein, you’re getting the components that need to come in with protein to make sure there’s no damaging byproducts of protein, you’re cleaning your bile, you’re going to be healthy, slim, and attractive.

Andrea:
But what about the other side effect of beans So let’s take an ad break, Allison, and we’ll come back to talk about the hazards of beans.

Andrea:
Digesting legumes i’m calling this section a layman’s understanding of the process so if you’re listening and you’re a microbiologist or a gastroenterologist please write in if i got this wrong i read so many papers on this and i think i put together a narration that combines i i had to be able to understand it and i explained it to multiple people in order to make sure i could say this well so thank you.

Alison:
For doing that thank you for doing this because reading those papers I know after like two or three of them.

Andrea:
Your eyes.

Alison:
Start to glaze over and you’re like oh what what was that I’ve.

Andrea:
Read that.

Alison:
For this and that and all the different long names and I know how hard it is to sort through that information and make it clearly accessible so.

Andrea:
Before you even started I could really benefit if somebody like Hannah wanted to teach us a class on reading papers that would be awesome I think I think I.

Alison:
Need a different brain because i just i glaze over.

Andrea:
After a.

Alison:
Little while i’m like am i still here hello what’s happening.

Andrea:
Exactly well i made it through by trying to narrate it actually narration was the most helpful tool because i found if i could explain it to you then i immediately saw where i couldn’t fill in the gap so here we go yeah yeah okay all right the difficult to digest part of beans which leads to the possibly unfortunate side effect as alluded to by the Sumerians and the ancient Norse, is oligosaccharides of the Raffinos and Stachios families. I will from now on just refer to oligosaccharides, not the family’s. Oligosaccharides, as the name kind of implies, are a type of carbohydrate. They move undigested through your stomach and then through your small intestine because we do not have the enzyme alpha-galactosidase in our stomach or small intestine.

Alison:
And that breaks it down.

Andrea:
Correct. I don’t know if some people do, or if they used to, or if it just never exists there. This is something I couldn’t figure out from all the literature that I went through. Nobody ever participated in that.

Alison:
Well, you would think if those old tablets had the jokes about the beans and the side effects of the beans, particularly in those civilizations, which were the cradle of humanity, a lot of them, that they didn’t have it by the sound of it.

Andrea:
Possibly. Well, as we’re going to come to, that’s not all a bad thing. Once the oligosaccharides pass unscathed into the large intestine, they are then fermented by bacteria that have the enzyme alpha-galactosidase. And here’s a direct quote. Once in the large intestine, Raffinose encounters resident gut microbes. I like to picture him facing them. Come on. Certain bacteria in the colon, your large intestine, possess the alpha-galactosidase enzyme and ferment the sugar for their own energy. This process produces gaseous byproducts, including hydrogen and carbon dioxide.

Andrea:
So the same way, Allison, if you were fermenting, say you put some ginger and a saccharide of some sort, some sugar or sucanite or molasses into a closed container, then it produces carbon dioxide as they begin to digest those carbohydrates. And then everybody knows we’ve had some people blow up bottles and you open it and it froths out. If you don’t burp it, which I have to admit sounds better than farting your bottles, the fermentation process produces that proliferation of beneficial bacteria in the beverage that are good for us. So the fermentation process is a good thing. The waste product actually is a marketable thing because people say, I want my drink to be fizzy, and that’s the carbon dioxide, which is the waste product of the carbohydrates being consumed by the enzymes and the bacteria. However, in a bottle, that’s pretty easy to do. You just pop the lid. But if you’re in a public place and you’re the bottle, it’s a little more awkward as this scenario is recognized.

Alison:
It’s really interesting to actually potentially draw a line between the process being bad and the potential gas being bad. Because if you go to some ferments, like if you ferment buckwheat into a bread and it’s solely buckwheat, the gases that come off the buckwheat are really not pleasant at all. But the process of the buckwheat fermenting and the end result of the bread or the porridge or whatever you make is really tasty and really good. And the work that’s been done in that starch is wonderful. But the gases aren’t wonderful. And I think it’s easy for us to think, oh, well, if it smells bad, it must be a bad thing. But actually, those two things you’re saying, I think, have a distinction in them. It doesn’t mean necessarily that what’s happening is a bad thing. If the gas smells bad to us and i’m using quotes you know.

Andrea:
Right and fermenting foods in your, large intestine if you think about it it is producing more beneficial enzymes and bacteria by the process of fermentation just like you do when you make sauerkraut and those gut friendly bacteria make the alpha galactosidase enzyme so this is not a conclusion that was offered because the papers I was reading weren’t necessarily about health or anything. They were just more about processes. But my thought was, well, probably having beans on a somewhat regular schedule would be one of the most beneficial things you could do. Not only would you begin to be, you would have more of the things you needed to deal with beans, but you would also be continually getting the benefits of those, the bile being cleansed, the homocysteine being dealt with and all of those other benefits. And I apologize to anybody who is listening, and if I am painfully pronouncing names wrong, I’m doing my best, but I’m not a Latin speaker.

Alison:
Yeah, and we’re not scientists. It was interesting when we talked to Nicole about this last week when I was there, that she said, you know, is there a link between the potential offensive smelliness of gas and or it’s a bad thing or it’s a good thing? Does it mean and i wonder if it just means there are different strains of bacteria that are doing the fermentation or the beans are slightly different to one time to another time and therefore that’s producing different side effects i can imagine listening to what you’ve said that that could be the case that just a small change in the bacteria or a small change in the product the bacteria being fed could make a big difference to the um to the off gas that’s coming um did you come across any of that in your research or not?

Andrea:
No, I didn’t find anything particular, but I thought it would be interesting to see a PubMed article called something along the lines of a comparison of the aromas of different gaseous outputs from humans based on diverse inputs. But no such article was to be found by me at any rate. But if you know of one…

Alison:
Yeah, do send it away. Yeah.

Andrea:
So here’s another direct quote. Studies show that raffinose consumption, remember that’s the oligosaccharide family that is primarily responsible for this issue, raffinose consumption promotes the growth of health-associated bacteria, particularly bifidobacteria and lactobacilli. As these microbes ferment raffinose, they produce valuable compounds known as short-chain fatty acids. These short-chain fatty acids are used as an energy source by the cells lining the colon and contribute to a healthy gut environment.

Andrea:
So important. The farther down this path I went, the more convicted I felt that beans, I always just thought of them as kind of an alternate protein source. And I’m beginning to see that they play a much more important role in our body. And I can see why every culture that I can find, Thailand, Mesoamerica, the ancient Norse, Sumerians, they all seem to be prioritizing legumes in their diet somewhere. So which bacteria make alpha-galactosidase and contribute to breaking down the raffinose i wanted to know this particularly and i found the answer bacteroides satatomicron and bacillus subtilis yeah and just as a personal note of interest i looked these up on And Gary and I did gut tests recently, and we got spreadsheets back with thousands of gut bacteria on them. I looked them up to see if they were on the chart, and they were in extremely low proportions. So I thought, okay, I’m going to be needing more of these beans in my diet. And then resistant starches. This is where the short-chain fatty acids are important. Resistant starches are fermented to produce short-chain fatty acids like.

Andrea:
Say, if I’m pronouncing this right, but butyrate. And butyrate, we have found in other things, quite important. Because if you ever look up high blood sugar or how to manage blood sugar naturally, you’re going to come up with lots of conversations about producing short-chain fatty acids like butyrate, because these are necessary for maintaining stable glucose levels. A person with very low butyrate levels might find they have high fasting blood sugar. Also seems to come up as extremely important for weight loss, perhaps hence the swimsuit illusion by our prior advertisers. So now that we kind of understand what it is exactly process-wise that is causing the lower intestinal disturbances, let’s introduce a few methods of improving the process so that you don’t have quite so much bubbly. All right, the herbs.

Alison:
I have to just say, first of all, that um but gabriel would be very amused by all the different names you’re coming up for the lower intestinal disturbances i think i might introduce that one to him over dinner tonight, because um you know he’s a boy and he’s and he would be like wow andrea’s got andrea’s got all these names wow cool okay you tell him you.

Andrea:
Know everybody thinks it’s funny to grab the same one clever word that they’ve heard and use it over and over but if you want to be times funnier just come up with a different way to say it every time yeah it’s way more interesting so we’re turning.

Alison:
Okay i should.

Andrea:
Have alluded to also alice and i’m pretty sure shakespeare makes some references as well.

Alison:
Uh i think in um twelfth night what’s that one and there’s two like jokey buns one one blokes really big quick and there’s a short one that goes around with them, Andrew Ague-Cheek or something. I’m sure that there’s some references in there to that.

Andrea:
There has to be some kind of Falstaff joke or something. Okay, so not in Twelfth Night, but generally speaking. So now I want to turn to the interior of Mexico, which now we know perhaps our Mesoamerican neighbors were the, well, farther down than Mexico, but were the harbingers of legumes for the world. So maybe this is not surprising that we come to Mexican traditional foods. In Mexican traditional foods, beans are eaten daily. And I talked to Brittany, who is a listener and supporter, about this because she lives fairly close to Mexico. And she has spoken before of the herb epizote, which I don’t know if I’m pronouncing that right. She said the regions where it grows native are fairly small. It is technically a perennial plant, but if you’re out of the region, you can grow it as an annual. It can be purchased dried in Latin groceries. I could not find it online anywhere.

Alison:
Oh, gosh.

Andrea:
It is also considered medicinal. Mountain Rose Herbs sells the seeds for it, and in English, epizote translates to stinky sweat or skunk sweat. And apparently, if you buy it fresh, you understand how it earned the name. It has a strong and pungent aroma, but when you dry it or you cook it, the odor mellows out, leaving behind a pleasantly complex taste. Brittany has said before she loves putting epizote in beans any time she cooks them, but epizote is more than just a complex, pleasant taste. It is one of a number of herbs known as carminatives.

Alison:
Okay.

Andrea:
I hope I got that right. These are gas and bloating-reducing herbs. So there’s kind of a family of carminatives. That isn’t the proper Linnaeus term. It’s not a classified family, but I’m just using it in that way. The way it works is not well-researched, to which I say, why? Why don’t we understand this? The information out there on this is surprisingly lean, but it is believed to reduce the amount of gas-producing bacteria as well as reduce the amount of oligosaccharides that are fermented. And if I understand what I read rightly, it is breaking down the oligosaccharides before they get to the large intestine, where gas is usually produced. I think what I read said that they believe it to reduce the amount of gas-producing bacteria. I actually doubt that aspect. My my thought is probably that it is reducing the oligosaccharides so then by natural progression the gas producing bacteria are then produced less i doubt that it’s actually reducing bacteria if that makes sense yeah.

Alison:
That’s interesting how did britney learn about this do you did she tell you that or not.

Andrea:
Probably culturally is my guess because when you’re along the mexican border you You know, you can find a lot more traditional Mexican food.

Alison:
Interesting.

Andrea:
And so you would see it pop up more. But she grows it. And there are other carminative herbs.

Alison:
Yeah, yeah. I remember reading. Because I think chamomile is one. I seem to remember that chamomile is a carminative herb because I’ve had that quite a lot.

Andrea:
It is on the list indeed. So I’ll throw the list down for you. Lemon balm, dill, aniseed, fennel, licorice root, rosemary, slippery elm, marshmallow root, peppermint, ginger, chamomile, turmeric, cardamom, pineapple sage, green coriander, and cinnamon. There’s another Mexican herb or an herb Mexicans use called yerba santa, which is from a different region, and it is sometimes used to flavor beans. And it is, quote, also used as a bitter tonic to stimulate digestion. Chewing on tender, young yerba santa leaves is good for digestion. So we’re always coming back to the bitterness, and if you’ve ever butchered an animal.

Andrea:
Then you’ve seen the bile sac and everybody’s like, don’t cut the bile sac. If you cut the, if you nick the bile sac, you ruined everything within spitting distance. Because that is a bitter, bitter green liquid that comes out of the bile sac. It is extremely bitter. And, you know, like cure is like, as we hear in Ancestral Food all the time. So I think, well, bitter herbs for your bile cleansing. That makes sense to me. So it seems to me logical, all things being equal, to cook your beans with some of these herbs. Why not? I mean, who doesn’t want some cumin and coriander in their beans? That sounds amazing. And maybe not peppermint. I don’t know about that one. But you could also chew on some of the digestive bitter herbs. Nobody’s feelings are hurt by chewing on some peppermint or drinking a little, you know, aniseed and lemon balm tea. That sounds just wonderful. There’s also a product that is sold here in the United States, I think was invented in Canada, which apparently, Allison, the name has a different meaning where you live, but it isn’t offensive at all. So the product is called Vino, and this is the enzyme alpha-galactosidase.

Alison:
Oh, so you can actually take the enzyme.

Andrea:
Mm-hmm.

Alison:
I see.

Andrea:
What you would do is you would take it right before you started eating it so that the minute the beans hit your stomach, alpha-glactosidase is already in there.

Alison:
Yeah.

Andrea:
And it would also move into your small intestine. I do not know enough about the process here to understand how you then don’t just have the bacteria buildup or the gas buildup in your stomach. So somebody who is more familiar with it may need to inform us on that. I didn’t go super far down this trail simply because I was looking for more ancestral means of dealing with the problem, but this is something people swear by. Yeah, and I’m not to say you should or should not do that. I just was looking for specifically ancestral methods. It apparently also doesn’t entirely eliminate the problem. It just reduces it.

Alison:
Okay.

Andrea:
You can take digestive bitters as a supplement as well, like in capsules. And then Young Living sells a blend that we’ve used for years and years called Digize, which is a kind of nickname for digestive energizer. And that is a blend of tarragon, ginger, peppermint, juniper, fennel, lemongrass, anise, and patchouli. And you can put it on your stomach or under your tongue or drink it in tea or in honey, clearly it’s all of the bitters that you know carminatives and whatnot so yeah some people do that and then as a side note britney said there’s a restaurant called fonda san miguel and if you’re ever in texas which all of a sudden is three times bigger than the uk so kind of a you know if you’re ever in texas in this area then she said they serve really great interior mexican food.

Andrea:
So the last addition to your cooking in terms of herbs that can help you digest i got from katherine chap and the weston a price article again that is linked in the show notes as is all the articles and the websites of the restaurant I just mentioned, all in the show notes. So Catherine says, another trick to cooking beans and minimizing those troublesome oligosaccharides is to add a four to six inch strip of the sea vegetable kombu, in your bean pot during the warmed soak period, which I will explain farther down. Kombu helps alkalinize water and also contains alpha-galactosidase, the enzyme needed for digesting these complex sugars, therefore enhances the process. So, I also…

Alison:
I would be interested to know if other people do that, whether it’s made a difference. Because when we were in Italy, maybe when Gabriel was quite young, I did that religiously and did not notice any difference at all. So, I’d like to know whether anyone else notices it makes a difference. So, do come to Discord if you’re a supporter and let me know if you try that, how it goes.

Andrea:
Now i want to make a quick note on something that i am not informed enough on to really discuss but i want to make sure it’s noted if somebody is listening and they’re thinking wait a minute alpha galactosidase i have alpha gal syndrome keep in mind alpha gal is so this is a syndrome that can be you can get it after a tick bite and it is oh i’m trying to get the name right it’s like alpha, It’s a protein, if I’m remembering rightly, not an enzyme. So alpha-galactosidase, the ending is quite important. A’s is the endings you see on enzymes. And so this is not the same thing as the animal or the mammalian sensitivity that you would see in alpha-gal syndrome. So, this may be something you want to discuss with an actual gastroenterologist who does something with your stomach.

Alison:
We know what you mean.

Andrea:
Yes, you get the point. But just keep in mind, those are two different things. So, next I want to address, Allison, the benefits of soaking. I want to explain how that can help. So now that we feel a little more confident about the process that beans use to produce gas, let’s take a quick ad break and then talk about sources for beans and cooking methods to deal with that process.

Andrea:
All right, I’m actually going to lead with sources just real quick because that is going to be important for you as we go through the explanation process of dealing with beans. So first off, I’m going to say that, like everything else we’ve discussed ever, the ingredients and how they are raised is going to play a very key part in your experience of them. Yeah, for better or for worse.

Andrea:
I would always say start by checking your local farms. And I will say, before you run to the grocery store and start writing down the price of dried beans there, let me just tell you that your local beans will be more expensive. They will also be a thousand times better, as I will prove to you in the next section. Yeah, at least a thousand times, possibly more. so if you’re in the western washington slash arlington area i will shout out garden treasures who was our csa source when we lived down south they are an excellent farm allison you’ve had their beans we sent you their jacob’s cattle beans i remember so delicious and when you have fresh which means raised within the past months year or raised within the past year beans you will realize you’ve been sold a lie your entire life it’s quite a shock to encounter fresh beans um i will also say for everybody who doesn’t live there rancho gordo this was a source shared by Brittany. And we’ll share a little bit more about them later. And then, Allison, for you in the UK, you have Padma Dodds, which I go to the website every once in a while, just like I go to Piper’s Farm, just to stare at the pretty pictures and cry.

Alison:
Look at the wonderful things that they’re growing.

Andrea:
I put links for all those places in the show notes. But I also just want to say, check around you. Ask around you. Ask at your farmer’s market. Do you know anybody who grows and sells dried beans? You don’t grow dried beans, but you grow them and you dry them. And I’ll also say many beans and many bean varieties are not in stock all the time. They’re grown and sold in the same year, so inevitably they’re going to run out. Hopefully they’ll run out within that year. And you get them while you can and you eat them while they’re fresh or, you know, they’re dried, but they’re still fresh.

Alison:
Yeah.

Andrea:
So let’s talk about ancestral preparation. Yeah. First, Alison, I want to ask you, if or when you ever cook legumes, which you’ve alluded to that you don’t tons and tons because of aforementioned issues, how do you do?

Alison:
So we always soak them at least overnight in water that is warm. Usually how I do that is I put cold water in, you know, % cold water, and then I boil the kettle and I put a little bit in of hot water that’s just boiled, stir it around because I can never get water to the right temperature, you know, in its entirety.

Andrea:
I know, me either. I was overshoot the mark.

Alison:
So stir that around and then put the beans in. And then usually I put apple cider vinegar in, stir them, put a plate on the top, leave them at least overnight. And sometimes I will leave them two, three days. Sometimes… I am not ready to eat them then and I will put them in the fridge. If I do that, I usually drain off that liquid and redo the liquid and put them in the fridge or drain them completely and leave them in the fridge drained and then rinse them before I cook them. I will watch the water and see the state it’s in because sometimes some beans, you leave them for a day and the water is really quite horrible. It’s got the scum on the top. It’s got lots of kind of soapy kind of stuff in the water. So i will drain the water and do it again um sometimes depending on how much time i’ve got when i’m looking at it how long i’ve left it for and then i will cook them and the moment we if we do beans we cook them in an instant pot because um stephen gundry’s book about lectins had a big influence on the problems that we have with gable and um he has some studies which shows, that the only way to get rid of lectins in beans is to cook them in a pressure cooker. So we use the instant pot for our beans.

Andrea:
All right.

Alison:
So that’s it. Did I pass?

Andrea:
Sounds good. Well, it sounds very similar to what I’ve always done.

Alison:
Okay.

Andrea:
I do the same. I rinse them well usually. Ours are sometimes kind of dirty. And I sort them if I need to. And then I cover them with warm water. And I soak them overnight. I usually throw in either a splash of whey or some lemon juice. Apple cider vinegar would work too I just usually don’t have that on my counter and then in the morning I rinse them very thoroughly and I bring them to a boil in fresh water oh yeah I missed that bit, always fresh water, and then sometimes I actually they come to a boil and then I, pour them through a metal strainer and I drain all that water out and I rinse them and then I put in clean water again and cook them again well they’re not even cooked yet you know they just came to a boil sometimes I’ve done that multiple times like if I’m just in the kitchen I just take I keep starting them over basically that’s really interesting because.

Alison:
You know that the Chinese do that for pork stock I remember reading it in um nourishing Asian kitchen the book that Chelsea green published last year and to get that clear broth.

Andrea:
You know.

Alison:
Because the the protein clouds come up um in china they they put the pork stuff in and then literally when it comes to the boil and all that scum’s there instead of skimming the scum off like we might do or stirring it back in if we.

Andrea:
Don’t want to well they.

Alison:
Tip it all through a sieve like.

Andrea:
You’re doing explaining.

Alison:
To do with the beans put it all back in and then put fresh water in so that’s a similar kind of process.

Andrea:
That’s interesting i actually ran across some things bean wise that i just didn’t even cram into this episode that would that referred to the cloudiness of water okay well i’m feeling very incestable um so my process feels a little bit laborious but it’s i i don’t like soaking beans in warm water i don’t know why i started doing that i just felt like that’s what the beans wanted, and then rinsing them and putting them back in and rinsing them, again, I just felt like that’s what the beans wanted. It doesn’t make any sense, but sometimes I just feel like the food wants me to do something, and so I do it. And then when I read the article that I’m going to refer to later, I was like, ah, this is why the beans wanted me to do that.

Andrea:
So why soak beans? Why not just put them straight, dried with water into the Instant Pot, as every Instant Pot recipe will tell you to do? Well, for one, beans that are soaking will absorb the water. They’ll usually, not lentils and not peas so much, but they’ll double their size before you even cook them. So the starches expand slowly and uniformly when they’re soaking, which avoids the problem of split skins. And, you know, split skins, if you’re making refried beans, not such a problem, but, you know, split skins can then get you that cloudy water that you’ve referred to with the pork broth, which you don’t always want. And for two, soaking begins the process of breaking down the oligosaccharides that are so tough to digest. Soaking does not entirely remove them, or at least generally speaking, it doesn’t. Stay tuned. But it does reduce them somewhat. Hence, there’s less carbon dioxide and hydrogen from that large intestine fermentation process.

Andrea:
And the third reason is soaking neutralizes phytic acid in beans. So, as we know, phytates can block the absorption of minerals. And do you remember when we said earlier, there’s so many minerals in beans? Well, if you get those minerals with the phytates, well, then you won’t be getting quite as much of a benefit from those minerals. And if you listen to the oat episode, it isn’t really a problem to encounter phytates every once in a while, but if you have them at every single meal, and especially today when all of us are mineral deficient to start with, it is a real problem. So we’ll come back to this later.

Alison:
That’s where the warm water comes in, certainly for grains. And I’m sure it’s the same for, and the acid actually, it’s the same for legumes. Because in order to most effectively get rid of the phytic acid, you know, make sure the phytase, the enzyme does its job to get rid of it. You need to keep those beans at a warm temperature and you need to have an acidic environment. So when we talk about soaking, we’re not just talking about putting them in the cold water, So the hot water and the acidic addition is for that reason.

Andrea:
Now, also, Alison, you referred to the foamy, soapy look. This is the dissolved oligosaccharides. They give that soapy look to the top of water. So rinsing the beans thoroughly before cooking them is how you reduce the oligosaccharides that are in your pot. Interestingly, the beans can resorb those oligosaccharides if you don’t strain them out. And skimming the foam when it’s boiling, and then I realized that’s why sometimes I just was instinctively taking the pot off and pouring the entire thing through a metal strainer and starting over because it seemed like skimming wasn’t just sufficient enough. So some beans are more foamy as well.

Alison:
What’s interesting with that is the aqua faba, the bean soaking liquid, is used in cooking. It can be, I know people have used it as an egg substitute and people use it for several other cooking things. um and so actually potentially that water has the soaking water.

Andrea:
Well not necessarily because as we’ll see in actually i have a jar of aquapapa in my fridge right now but as we’ll see you could have skim rinsed and then started over all of that before the beans cooked.

Andrea:
All of this is like in a preparation to cooking the beans. So then the beans cook and the thick liquor that they kind of produce could then be your aqua fodder. So that’s a possibility. All right. So now we’re getting to the trucks of the argument or the point of the show, which is the specific process detailed also in the Weston A. Price article. And then the steps and the portions in there I was finding in other literature before I even got to the Weston A. Price article, and I kind of put everything together and realized, oh, this is what’s happening. So, the researchers who came up with the method I’m about to describe were granted a patent by the U.S. Patent Office, described as they devised a way to remove flatulence-causing oligosaccharides in legumes for the commercial bean canning industry. The bean technicians describe a process gleaned from careful observation and precise measurement and without special effects or secret ingredients, which makes use of just water, heat, and time.

Andrea:
These are things we come up with now. I will argue that there’s a few measuring tools that you would need to have to really do this accurately. And I don’t think it’s unreasonable to have these in the kitchen, especially because I already have them. So I feel like, oh, that’s probably not that far off the mark to have them in someone’s kitchen. So I’m going to give the steps and sort of flesh out the reasons for them. And then I will give a brief summary or an overall narration of the steps since I’m going to be talking a bit about each step. And I also typed out my summary narration and put it in the show notes on our website. So if you want to save the details to a note in your phone or something, you’ve got them there. All right number one step one is choosing your beans with great care less than months old.

Andrea:
Older than months they have a declining nutrient level they’re harder to rehydrate they have a wrinkly skin and they have a tough skin and i thought oh no i had so many beans that are really old somebody gave me i’ve referred to before many like gallon buckets full of beans and they’re pretty old and so i keep thinking well we’ll finish using them and then but at this point i’m like i don’t know maybe we shouldn’t yeah we’ll come back to that later, the best age for beans and remember these people are talking to the bean canning industry so you do have more leverage there you can do this in a specific season.

Andrea:
If you’re a home canner, I will say you could can your beans for the year at a specific time of year if you bought them all fresh and dried from a farm. The best age for beans is from harvest to four months old. That is quite a short window.

Alison:
Yeah, definitely.

Andrea:
But now we know. All right, number three. Best age was number two. Number three, I discovered in multiple places that hard tap water we’ve heard this before britney said she’s heard it too it reinforces the pectin in the skins everybody says don’t use hard tap water they don’t say why this is why it reinforces the pectin in the skins which increases the likelihood that they will split and so a tougher skin you just imagine you know now you have something inside that’s trying to expand and it can’t because the skin is extremely tough. Some people said, oh, I thought with a tougher skin, it won’t split, but it’s actually going to split more. Like having a brittle building material instead of one that can flex and breathe like wood. The materials bind with the beans’ natural compounds and make them tougher. Minerals in water.

Alison:
Okay.

Andrea:
So you don’t want hard water. Again, Then I found that if they are soaked for too short of a time and then cooked, they will still split because they did not hydrate evenly. The example given, linked in the show notes, was kidney beans soaked for six hours. Kidney beans are pretty big. They’re like about the biggest bean, one of the biggest beans you’re going to encounter. So six hours is not enough. You said you soaked yours overnight. I think a lot of us do because we just put it, you know, to soak and then we go to bed. So the size and type of legume affects soaking time. I don’t have an exact table for you of the size, but this is where I would say, you need a kitchen notebook, and you need to be making notes to successes and failures as you go. Back to the Weston A. Christ article, they say…

Andrea:
The key to the flatulence-free method of bean preparation that we’re describing here is utilizing maximally two actions, which you guys understand so well because of all the things we just talked about. One, leeching out those pesky oligosaccharides into a warm, slightly basic soap water. The other, to initiate the activity of, guess what, endogenous oligosaccharide-reducing enzymes to digest the sugars inside the bean. You can start that process. That’s what these researchers found, was you can start the starch digestion in the bean before you even start cooking it.

Andrea:
All right, step five. The beans are covered with four times their weight in water, and the water is warmed to about degrees Fahrenheit. So, Allison, this affirms you and I using warm water. I just felt like it was better, but I didn’t know why, and you clearly knew, because you’ve read everything Weston Price anyways, but you also knew. And the researchers stated different bean varieties rehydrate best at slightly different temperatures, but the range is from Fahrenheit to Fahrenheit and represents the optimal temperature for rehydrating beans to between and % of their fresh weight. So if you peg it right in the middle at like , , I feel like you’ll be on the money. Number six Yes, the soft water And as This is also confirmed by what I had found The water used in this stage should be soft Quote, specifically with a calcium carbonate content Less than parts per million.

Andrea:
How many of us are featuring that? But you can hit it with a pH meter, and they say with a pH between . and . So pretty base. In other words, just slightly acid to alkaline. And also, this is confirmed by Catherine found th century cookbooks that noted the types of water to use. And they said, well water, rich in minerals, was the least favored.

Alison:
Okay.

Andrea:
Well water coming down from, you know, it’s run through all the stones, it’s down by the, it’s nice and rich in minerals, not so great for, you know, those minerals are going to be binding to the beans’ natural compounds, and it’s going to make the beans tough, and they’re going to split and all these problems. So, you can measure the pH in your own kitchen fairly easily. What were you going to say, Alison?

Alison:
I was going to say, I just remembered Patient Grey’s Honey from a Weed. There’s a section there on cooking beans. And I seem to remember that she said that when the beans were older, that the skin was tougher, just like what you just said. But that they put bicarbonate of soda in the water, which breaks down the pectin. So I think maybe if people have beans that are old, like that stash you’ve got that’s very, very, very old.

Andrea:
Right maybe.

Alison:
You could just add a bit of um bicarb of soda in and it would help those skins not be as as tough and split i just remember.

Andrea:
That suddenly because britney said she had heard that as well um also reducing the acidity in the water and he put the baking soda in and the method i used for making hummus i actually take cooked chickpeas and then i boil them for minutes with baking soda to really make them mushy, because they blend into just magic after you do that. I learned that from Cookies and Kate’s website. Their hummus recipe is the bomb. Okay, I’ll put that in the show notes, too. Fine. Twist my arm. So, the… All right, so that was, let’s see, were we on step six? We were on step six.

Alison:
Yeah, you were talking about the well water.

Andrea:
Yep. Okay, so the beans were rehydrated in this experiment. Now, rehydration, I’m going to now say rehydration is step one of the soaking. There’s two steps to the soaking process. Yes, rehydration is step one, and then you’re going to do a second step of soaking, all as a preamble to the cooking. So don’t be alarmed at this short time. They rehydrated the beans for one to four hours. So rehydration, step one. Warming is step two before the canning process, or in our case, the cooking. Or you could be canning. So we’ll get all of our hours of soaking in by the time we get to the end of step one and step two. So the time it takes to rehydrate beans will vary widely, but it seems to range from one to four hours. And a well-hydrated bean has tissues, I quote Catherine here, that will allow migration of the endogenous enzymes throughout the entire bean to digest the sugars in step two. So you’re rehydrating the bean, you’re getting it kind of close to size, to % of its fresh size, and you’re making space inside for there to be pathways where endogenous enzymes can move to the sugars. And then they’re going to do their work. Their labors will commence in step two.

Alison:
Okay.

Andrea:
All right. So the beans have been warm at . And I was thinking, Alice, in one to four hours at , that’s exactly like making yogurt. So we could, perhaps I’m going to start soaking my beans in a cooler the same way I soak or ferment yogurt in a cooler.

Alison:
You know, when I did my research into phytic acid and grains, I could see that the science papers were maintaining that warm temperature. And I just thought us home cooks aren’t we might be starting with F exactly but if you leave that on the counter all day it’s not going to be that temperature by the end of the day minutes it’ll be down on that temperature yeah not quite the same as what they’re doing in the labs but I don’t have the facility to test what’s happening with my temperature dropping and I don’t have the headspace or the facility to maintain that one two of for hours but if you do then you’re more likely to get scientifically better results i think.

Andrea:
Right and what i figured as i read this was i just have to treat it like any other ferment or bread dough or something where you want to keep it warm and i have devised methods to do that without power many’s the time and the the means I use the most, you have your proofing box. And then I use just a standard lunch cooler and I put it on the kitchen floor and I put in my container of warm milk with inoculation in it. And then I put in a jar on either side of basically boiling water. And the entire situation as I close it up warms up to and stays right at the perfect temperature for yogurt. It’s still warm when I open it the next day, and certainly for one to four hours, it would be fine. So my thought was, I guess I could just be more serious about this and just approach it like any other fermentation project.

Alison:
Yeah, it’s interesting because my proofing box doesn’t go up as high. F is about C, which is quite potential.

Andrea:
You’re probably…

Alison:
A dehydrator could, if I still have my dehydrator.

Andrea:
Which I don’t. Yeah.

Alison:
And if I had the space in it. So a dehydrator can go to . Some of the ovens can go to and go down as low as C. So you could keep it in a very, very low oven. Yeah. Because that’s a higher temperature than, you know, I would leave a bread dough at or i would leave my my milk kefir at this end for sure.

Andrea:
Yeah or you could put it i also have done this before but it does take power i put the boot warmer next to whatever it is i’m fermenting and then i put a cardboard box over the top it’s pretty well yeah um and if you’re thinking that’s too many steps well we’ll talk about that in a minute okay so now that the beans are warmed at a temperature low enough to not kill the native enzymes this is important remember Remember, heat kills enzymes. We want those enzymes alive and just warmed up enough to start working and digest the sugars. The temperature cannot reach Fahrenheit or everybody’s dead in there. So the beans are then drained. And then the soft, neutral to slightly . to pH alkaline water is added to the beans. at a ratio, again, four parts water to one part beans by weight. So this time, the water is heated slightly more to a temperature that the authors of the study determined was optimal for maximum activity of the endogenous enzymes. That temperature is . But remember that the enzymes are destroyed at , so I feel like is like, wow.

Alison:
It’s a fine line.

Andrea:
Yeah. Yeah. So, Allison, I think the world has space for you to invent a pot. That the beans go in like a washing machine. It dumps the water, it drains, it runs it again, it needs that to temperature. Okay, maybe not. Maybe the world’s not in there for that much magnificence yet, but it could be. So, I think that might be the toughest step because you don’t— I would say maybe I’d be targeting like . You need a thermometer if you’re doing this accurately.

Andrea:
And then step nine. So this is what I found interesting, Alison. We alluded to it before. So I had the habit of changing and rinsing the water while the beans are soaking, sometimes multiple times, and then also sometimes during the boil. Clearly, I’m exceeding Fahrenheit if I’m boiling the beans. So the enzymes, oh, they’re dead. But some instinct was telling me that I didn’t want the beans soaking in the water perpetually that their oligosaccharides had gone out into, even though I did not know that that’s what was happening. So in step two, when the beans are at this amazingly precise Fahrenheit or I don’t know, Celsius or something, then while they’re in this heated but not hot step, the water was changed two or three times to allow for continuous diffusing of the sugars into the water so if you think about it the enzymes are hard at work they’re shoving all those sugars out the door and then the sugars are floating around in the water trying to find a home and if the water is not changed the equilibrium between the beans and the soak water is reached that is to say the beans absorb all the water back in the sugar can diffuse back into the beans Hmm. Are we still, are we all here?

Alison:
I’m still with you. I’m just wondering. Oh yeah, I’m just, I’m just, I’m waiting to the end so I can say, okay, just tell me in three sentences what I need to do. But I know from reading these reports, and this is a scientific lab situation and it’s not a situation that we can ever, well, perhaps someone could, perhaps with a test kitchen at home you could.

Andrea:
But really realistically.

Alison:
In a life where there’s work and kids and family and friends and things to do this is extreme.

Andrea:
Someone’s been there like someone’s been there i want to give the complete description and the reasons why for everything because then you can decide which pieces you’re willing to compromise on because you know exactly what you’re doing all right step , we haven’t even cut to beans yet all right soaking times ranged from two to six hours depending on the size of the bean smaller being shorter stuff the conclusion was that at the end of step two so that f temperature for two to six hours with changing the water one to three times presumably i guess they did it you know every third of the time it sounds like then And the beans were tested and had no oligosaccharides.

Alison:
Oh, my gosh.

Andrea:
None. At which point, they were then briefly blanched to firm the protein, so they would have been plunged into boiling water, and then taken off to be canned. And now your bean’s ready to cook. So, step . In the canning process… Obviously the beans are cooked the rest of the way you could move your beans at this point to the instant pot allison to do your kill off the leptin situation you could cook them on the stovetop britney says once you put beans into a dutch oven her her method her comments and her notes are in the show notes on the website because it’s a little bit long so it’s not in the not in the podcast app but she says once you put them in the oven and cover them and bake them rancho gordo method um you’ll never go back to boiling beans or you can blanch your beans um and for canning safety purposes they must be in the boiling liquid for minutes then you could pressure can in jars and angie who’s a podcast listener and supporter her pressure canning book is listed in the show notes because i use that book the canning does not have the steps i just described for eliminating the oligosaccharides but it has the canning process which you could then utilize and.

Alison:
I think if you get to the end of this step we’re on you should probably go and have a lie down.

Andrea:
And pat yourself.

Alison:
On the back immensely because.

Andrea:
Take off your white jacket your goggles your safety goggles your hair cap bluffs, Um, and now I’ll give you , which is just my summary. Here we go. Okay, this is good.

Alison:
Okay, I’m ready.

Andrea:
Fresh beans are ideal. Under four months old if you can, but certainly under months. Step one, you’re going to cover them in soft water. Water, which is four times the beans’ weight at about Fahrenheit or Celsius.

Alison:
Mm-hmm.

Andrea:
Rehydrate the beans one to six hours depending on the bean size and make notes on the beans that split to help you know. Also, please send us your notes. Drain the beans of their soaking water. Step two, put the beans in fresh, soft water, preferably warmer at about . Let them soak at this temperature. Use a cooler like we do with yogurt. I imagine we’re not going to keep it at perfect, but if you’re keeping And it’s fairly warm. Remember, is just the optimal, maximum oligosaccharide activity. Still, some activity is a good thing. But enzymes need warmth, but not blasting heat. Let them soak at or C for to hours, depending on the bean size. And change the water to times. At the end of this period, move on to canning or boobene. That’s not so bad, is it?

Alison:
No, it’s not. And enjoy them and cook them in bulk because if you do it in a big batch, then you won’t have to do that. And then when you actually sit down to eat them, tell your husband what you did to prepare all these beans and see what he says.

Andrea:
He’s like, what? Because our Benson burner on that can’t. Why do you have a pH meter light on the counter? Why is there a water gravity skit? I don’t know. I’m making up words now. I’m not a scientist.

Andrea:
Um yeah make sure everybody knows that you’re a martyr and how much to get there exactly um but yes i was going to affirm that alice and i would say this is also why we do the beans in bulk because you’re thinking what well you did all that you might as well have done more than that day’s dinner definitely and you can use the super cubes to freeze you know one cups of just you know once you cook the beans say you could freeze one cup batches of beans and cooking liqueur or you could just freeze wide mouth pint jars of it you could even freeze cooled gallon bags of the beans you could pressure can the beans so i usually do five pounds at a time of beans because then i can pressure can two batches and and get a bunch of pint jars of beans on the shelf either way i do say do at the very least cook the week’s worth of beans you know cook enough black beets that you can serve some at lunch or on a salad or put them into your bean brownies throughout the week at the very least that would be my suggestion yeah yeah i want to hit real quick allison back on neutralizing neutralizing phytic acid because so much attention was given to the oligosaccharides i want to make sure that i kind of emphasize this just a little bit because it is going to slightly adjust some information that we utilize. So phytates, as we mentioned, phytate prevents mineral absorption, most especially zinc and iron.

Andrea:
And everybody who’s listened to more than three episodes of our podcast knows this, but I’ll say it anyways. You know that flour and grains contain phytate, which is why ancestral preparations want you to prepare them by soaking or leavening the grains, which neutralizes the phytates. So we are chronically low on minerals these days and a big part of that could be that even if you’re taking your electrolytes and you’re taking mineral drops you might be pairing your you know you’re pairing your minerals like the potassium with it and i’m not putting calcium in it and all these things you may be getting very technical about getting your minerals in but you may be then immediately binding them up with non-ancestrally prepared brains and losing the benefits of your sometimes very expensive electrolyte supplementation. So I just want to make that statement so that everybody understands, you know, when we harp on and on about soaking grains, this is primarily one of the reasons why. So soaking the beans releases phytase. Remember we talked about enzymes and endogenous enzymes? Well, phytase is one of those enzymes, and this degrades phytates.

Andrea:
The bean is dried in order to halt the enzyme activity generally speaking and keep the bean from sprouting and growing so when you are hydrating the bean you’re trying to turn all those systems back on which begins the degrading of the phytates and technically the degrading of the food in general that’s why it’s dried to store on your shelf and then you soak it or cook it to But how acidic does a soaking water need to be to activate these phytase enzymes?

Andrea:
The literature says that soaking the water to activate phytase needs to be from . to . pH, so slightly more acidic than our oligosaccharide-consuming enzymes to slightly less alkaline than they called for. And if I was to layer the research of both and we wanted to get very precise, then we would say perhaps our optimal window for soaking beans, if phytase activates best at . to . and then the other enzymes are activating best at . to , we could even close that window down to the very small window of . to .. And the Weston A. Price article linked in the show notes below does provide a table showing the optimal pH for phytate breakdown in five different legumes, which kind of spans that range.

Andrea:
I would say it’s possibly more important than we’ve thought to ensure that the water is fairly alkaline. And I don’t know if you can use like a garden pH meter to check that. I have a small bench pH meter. You can get them online where you just you put a little liquid in a container and then pop your pH meter sensor into it. And it tells you it’s far more accurate than the strips. But if you just wanted to get into if you wanted to be in the range of . to , you can definitely get that off of just a strip. So the question is just how much of a concern is this to you, and how seriously do you want those enzymes doing their work? That would probably determine how much money and time you were willing to spend on your pH. And I, personally, the strips make me crazy. They’re so subjective, and I don’t love them. That’s why I got the actual meter. Yeah, I get that. So, and then drawing a question that I pinned farther up, or mentioned farther up, can you use the old beans?

Andrea:
I really wanted to find out how old the average bean in a grocery store was, and I couldn’t find that anywhere. All I could find was, beans can last a really long time if you store them, right? I’m like, yeah, I get that. But like, how old are they? I don’t know. We know that the average apple in a grocery store is months old, so I think we can infer that dried beans coming in plastic bags are probably at least settled, if not older.

Andrea:
But I don’t know how their supply rotates. So, beans get harder to cook. They have tougher skins. They aren’t as nutritious. I have some old beans, over years old beans, and I have found you can soak them and then bring them to a boil for minutes, per Angie Schneider’s pressure canning book. Linked in the show notes below, and then you can pressure can them. And actually, the pressure canning process produces a remarkably tender and creamy bean. I tried this with some navy beans, and I thought, there’s no salvaging this bucket of beans. They’re not cooking soft. They’re always crunchy. They’re always hard. I thought, let me just try canning them. I was stunned at how good they came out. I did not have the same success trying soaking and then cooking in the instant pot you would think i do not think the instant pot gets up to the kind of pressures that a big pressure canner can and they were still annoyingly crunchy or hard even after obnoxiously long cooking times in the instant pot okay um and cooking in the instant pot just takes a ton of power which i don’t usually want to use so um if you think you cannot cook beans very well Well, I’m guessing the beans you have are not very good.

Alison:
Yeah. I can always get mine soft in the Instant Pot.

Andrea:
I’ve never had a helping. Yeah, so I think the problem is not you, the cook in the kitchen. I think it’s the product that you’re holding in your hands. Rancho Gordo. Rancho Gordo hasn’t popped up that much in this episode, but let me tell you how many articles I read about them. A lot. I read a lot of articles about them because I thought, where did this company come from? How did they start? Why are they here? I linked some of those fascinating articles in the show notes, but one thing I read about was when the gentleman who started Rancho Gordo was, he was growing heirloom varieties, small heirloom varieties of beans in his backyard, basically, and he was selling them at a farmer’s market, and he was a tiny little table, and he said hippies would come up and yell at him for how expensive his beans were, and he was overpriced, and then he said this chef from…

Andrea:
Oh, some French restaurant I don’t remember the name of in California came to his table and then basically started going on and on how he changed his life and how having fresh within the year beans was the pinnacle of, you know, the culinary experience of beans on the table and all these things. I thought, wow, French Laundry. Is that the name of a restaurant? That’s what my head is saying. That might not be right. That doesn’t sound right, but whatever.

Andrea:
So I would say that getting fresh within the year beans can be a life-changing experience, and it may completely change your perspective on beans and the way we value beans as well. And note that the old beans are not bad in the sense of being rotten or dangerous or toxic to you somehow. They are less tasty, they are less palatable, they are less nutritious. And so many times people tell us that they feel like they cannot cook something well or they don’t like it, and it’s really just the ingredients that aren’t very good. So I would say check out Rancho Gordo for their recipes. They have great recipes on their website. They sell beans, % of which are out of stock because they sell them within like a month or two. It’s very quick. It’s a very rapid turnaround. It might be within four months. I might not have quite the right number, but I did find how short their turnaround is. It is extremely short. And they have a bunch of small growers in Mexico that grow beans in that area.

Andrea:
Specific bizarre types i’ve never heard of if you’ve heard of the navy bean the kidney bean the pinto bean black bean like there’s hundreds of beans out there to look at um i put britney’s instructions for cooking beans on the show notes on the website and do check out the show notes guys there’s a lot of stuff down there and if you have information on beans you want to send me please i’m very interested in hearing it so allison yeah do you feel encouraged to get needs to try. Or maybe adjust the method a little bit.

Alison:
Adjust the method. I think adjusting the method from that -step thing.

Andrea:
-step program for beans.

Alison:
Yeah, exactly. There are two more things that I’d like to add that came up while we were talking that I scribbled down. So the first one is often when I’ve been soaking my beans, they have sprouted. And that’s fine, particularly lentils. I remember soaking lentils and leaving them for a couple of days and they sprouted. And I’ve cooked sprouted lentils and they’ve been delicious. I think, I don’t know what it does to the oleosaccharides, but I think that it would neutralize the phytic acid because sprouting definitely activates phytase and therefore we get the phytic acid. The other thing I wanted to say was if you ever want a meditative sort of process that will make you sit down and force you to be still for a few hours, you can take the skins off your beans manually. And I have done that because the troublesome sugars that are in there are mostly in the skin, I think, I seem to remember. And so if you take the skin off then you are less likely to have problems and I remember making um.

Alison:
Some kind of butter beans um a long time ago when Gabriel was a little boy and I sat on the back step I cooked them in the slow cooker and then I sat on the back step while he was out in the little yard we had and literally shelled every single bean there must have been I don’t know or something of them in there and it took a long time but it was actually really relaxing and then I made like a tomato sauce and we ate them without a skin song. So that…

Alison:
If you want something that’ll make you sit and stop, you can buy some beans without the skins on. I know that chickpeas, only in Italy. I haven’t found them in this, at least I have found them in this country. I remember because Nicole came when we found them in the health food store. You can buy chickpeas without the skins on. I think you can probably buy other beans without the skins on. So again, that’s another option potentially to try or just sit there and pick all the skins off and watch your blood pressure go down as you do it.

Andrea:
Right. If you’re the kind of person who likes to peel wallpaper and stuff like that, it’s the most satisfying thing ever. I have spent many, many a long moment stirring and like skimming. Because, you know, if you have like a skimming spoon, you kind of stir your beans vigorously and then you skim off the skins and you’re like, oh, I’m going to do it again.

Alison:
I’m going to do it again.

Andrea:
What am I doing? How long have I been here? What day is it?

Alison:
Exactly um so yeah back to your question i feel like there are things in what you read and what you’ve presented to us that we can hand pick you know do we want to have a go with this will this fit into our routine a bit better can we tweak the temperature do we have a cooler you know that we can keep warm like that um you know do we want to change the way we’re soaking do we want to change the way we’re cooking like perhaps dumping the water out and putting fresh water back in There are so many options there to play with without having to do the whole steps.

Andrea:
Yes. First, you have to admit. Yeah, exactly. You have to admit to a higher enzyme power.

Andrea:
I wanted to close with an encouragement that is kind of based on some of the things we discussed, some of the ideas that came through the pantry episode, which is that one advantage of cooking less variety of things is you really get to focus on perfecting and fine-tuning the few things you are doing. You raise the value of those things in your hand most significantly. And you also notice changes and responses to adaptations in your process much more quickly. If you have beans a few times a week, carefully and precisely prepared versus once a month or rarely, they become not only part of a routine or a habit, but it’s also very noticeable to you when you change the pattern. And Allison, I feel like you and I are both, because of the attention we already give beans, then when we shift anything in this, in this -step program, we’re going to rapidly notice if it had a difference. And I am most encouraged also personally by understanding why I’m doing this stuff. Like knowing is the optimal maximum activity of the endogenous enzymes. Well, maybe if I can get it pretty close to that and most of the enzyme activity has happened, the majority of the starches are handled.

Alison:
And that’s good enough.

Andrea:
I’m okay with that. They were going for % perfection, and maybe I can get pretty close to that. That’s still going to be a huge win. Combine that with cooking some bitters or chewing digestive bitters throughout the day, and I feel like we’ve got a good program going.

Alison:
Yeah, I agree. I agree.

Andrea:
All right, Alison. Well, I’m going to be soaking beans today because I’m so excited about this process.

Alison:
Wonderful. Well, I should let you go and do that then.

Andrea:
Of course.

Alison:
Thank you ever so much for all this research and for sifting through it and making it make sense. I’ve learned a lot today and so I’m sure that everyone listening has too. Thank you.

Andrea:
It was a delight. I’ll see you next time, Alison.

Alison:
Will do.