‘You can’t ask for better bang for buck’ … Rukmini Iyer’s lime-spiked black bean, avocado and rice taco bowl . Photograph: Ola O Smit/Photograph: Ola O Smit/The Guardian, Food Stylist: Sam Dixon, Prop Stylist: Anna Wilkins View image in fullscreen ‘You can’t ask for better bang for buck’ … Rukmini Iyer’s lime-spiked black bean, avocado and rice taco bowl . Photograph: Ola O Smit/Photograph: Ola O Smit/The Guardian, Food Stylist: Sam Dixon, Prop Stylist: Anna Wilkins Australian food and drink Musical fruit or unsung hero? A beginner’s guide to cooking with beans Long before becoming TikTok’s latest main character, food cultures around the world have been soaking and stewing beans to delicious effect. And yes, you can tone down the side-effects
Prefer the Guardian on Google F or months, TikTok home cooks have been spilling the beans on the nutritional power of soaking and simmering pots of cannellini, borlotti and black beans. There are more than 13,000 TikTok videos under the hashtag #beantok, with cooks claiming the humble legumes have alleviated their anxiety, perimenopause and inflammation. Pair that with “fibremaxxing”, and the bean has found itself recast from back-of-the-pantry afterthought to wellness main character.
But for many cooks and chefs, none of this is new. Many beans we eat today are native to the Americas and arrived in Europe by the 16th century, and were so readily adopted into Mediterranean cooking that it’s now hard to imagine those cuisines without them. “The Tuscans are even known as ‘mangiafagioli’: bean eaters,” says food writer Emiko Davies, who points out that beans were once the everyday nutrition of a largely peasant population.
Read more The same pattern holds well beyond Italy: south Asian kitchens are built on dal; Levantine cooking leans on chickpeas and broad beans; beans and rice are a widespread pairing across Central and South America; while black-eyed beans and pinto beans underpin many dishes of west Africa, with kidney and black beans in east Africa.
View image in fullscreen Full of beans: one cup of beans could provide up to one-third of an adult’s daily fibre requirement. Photograph: Tanja Ivanova/Getty Images “Beans are the unsung hero of bulking out a meal,” says the food writer and Guardian Australia columnist Alice Zaslavsky . “Whether it’s for their protein or their fibre, [or] for satiety, you can’t ask for better bang for buck.” A can of supermarket white or kidney beans will set you back about $2.
For Sharon Salloum, the chef at Sydney’s 3 Tomatoes cafe and author of Almond Bar: 100 Syrian Recipes, the appeal runs deep. “Something people don’t realise about Middle Eastern food is that we have a lot of vegan dishes in the traditional repertoire,” she says.
The MasterChef Australia contestant Olaolu Olorunnimbe, who grew up in Nigeria and England, sees the same principles at work in both countries’ cuisines. “Ewa aganyin with agege bread, and baked beans on toast are essentially versions of the same dish,” he says.
View image in fullscreen ‘The deeper the colour, the more interesting and intense the flavour’ … Rachel Roddy’s recipe for bean stew with lots of herbs . Photograph: Matthew Hague/The Guardian. Food and prop styling: Lucy Turnbull. Food styling assistant: Katie Smith. “Beans are a unique food as they contain both protein and fibre,” says Associate Prof Evangeline Mantzioris, program director of human nutrition at Adelaide University, noting they are also distinct for bei…