Thursday, 1 May 2008
== 8:30am ==

Dear Bean Diary:

This is one of the most exciting days of my whole life. After all these years of hearing contradictory stories about how to cook dried beans, I am finally going to get to the bottom of it. Soak or don't soak? Salt at the beginning or salt at the end? Simmer, boil, or slow‑cook? I want answers.

So today I cut up the sheet with all the different possibilities, 96 in total, folded them up carefully, and drew five from a hat. Well, from a soup tureen, actually. Then I swirled them all around and drew five out at random. I have a five-burner stove, so I can do five different kinds at once. Here are the methods I picked:

#25: overnight soak in unsalted water, drain, no salt till the end of the cooking, boil, no interruptions

#62: quick soak in unsalted water, drain, salt at the start of the cooking, boil, interrupt

#75: quick soak in unsalted water, don't drain, salt at the start of the cooking, simmer, don't interrupt

#88: don't soak, salt at the start of the cooking, simmer, interrupt

#93: don't soak, salt at the end of the cooking, simmer, don't interrupt

Yesterday I bought a pound of what I call navy beans and the supermarket calls great northern beans and divided them up into five batches weighing 3 ounces each and then distributed the extra beans one at a time till the five bowls were even.

I set #25 a-soaking at 12:45pm, drained it (pouring the drained water into my broth pot) and popped it on the stove, and now it's boiling away.

== 8:45am ==

OK, I've got all five pots going now. I've put masking tape directions on the tops of the pots so I can remember which ones are supposed to boil and which ones are supposed to simmer, and which ones I'm supposed to turn off and on again. I'm disappointed that none of the methods I picked called for the crockpot, which is how I usually cook beans, but it wouldn't be science if I got my way every time.

I feel like the five little pots are my children, or maybe my pets.

== 9:15am ==

Definitely more like children than pets -- I have to watch the little devils every minute.

#25 is throwing up a ton of scum, which I've conscientiously skimmed, even though I would never bother in real life.

I've got five burners, but they're not all the same strength. #75 is back on the simmer burner, which is good, because it's supposed to simmer, but #93, which is also supposed to simmer, is on the wok burner, and I just set a dishcloth on fire, not noticing how close it was to the wok burner, which I was trying to turn down to the lowest.

== 9:35am ==

OK, I'm interrupting #62 now. I guess I haven't really defined what constitutes an interruption. I'll turn it off and turn it back on again when it's cool enough so I can rest my hand against the bottom.

== 9:45am ==

Eek, #25 boiled over! That's why I started cooking beans in the crockpot. The ones I didn't boil over, I burned. Oh well, no great loss -- plenty was left in the pot.

== 9:50am ==

Omigosh, #25 is already done. Cheeze, I never soak beans so I had no idea they could cook that fast. In fact, to be honest, they seem kind of overcooked. I didn't know there was any such a thing as an overcooked bean -- I've certainly never made one before. But now I'm going to have to cook the other four that same amount of doneness.

I have no idea how people who salt at the end do it. Do they put the salt in and let the beans cook a little more? Or do they put the salt in, turn the heat off, and put the lid on? Or something else altogether? No chance for me to get away from these little darlings to do research, I have to watch them every minute.

I'm going to salt #25 to taste (my taste), put the lid on, and let it sit.

Yech, I had to taste the barely salted beans. Disgusting.

Oh no, I forgot I have to interrupt #88. OK, I'm putting it in the sink in cold water.

== 10:10am ==

OK, everybody's back cooking again.

== 10:20am ==

These are naughty, naughty children. As #75 and #88, and #93, the simmer triplets, cook down, it gets harder and harder to keep them at a simmer because there's less and less liquid.

Do you think I should have measured the water, Bean Diary?

== 10:50am ==

I'm adding salt at the end to #93 and letting it cook a little more. Not the same as #25. This science stuff is a lot harder than it's cracked up to be.

== 10:55am ==

#75 is done!

== 11:00am ==

#93 is done!

== 11:15am ==

I wish I could see some kind of pattern here in how long it takes the beans to cook. #25, of course, behaved differently because it was soaked overnight, but one of the quick-soak twins, #75, is done, and the other, #62, is not. Ditto with the don't-soak twins. #93 is done, #88 is not.

It's not the salting that makes the difference. #62, #75, and #88 were all salted at the start.

Oh.

I didn't measure the salt.

== 11:30am ==

#62 is done!

== 11:35am ==

And slowpoke #88 is done at last, the little rascal.

OK, now to label my 24 cute little white bowls. I label them (1)-(24) and then on a sheet of paper assign preparations to bowls randomly. #25 will goes in bowl (1), bowl (3), bowl (8), bowl (14), and bowl (17). #62 will go in bowl (2), bowl (9), bowl (16), and so on. I'm not going to dish them out now, though, lest they dry out.

Mark will taste this evening, and my other two tasters and I will taste tomorrow morning. Since everything is assigned randomly, and I don't have the sort of memory that will hold on to the fact that what's in bowl (11) is #93, I can taste along with everybody else.

== 6:00pm ==

I can hardly wait for Mark to get home. But I'm not going to make him taste beans first. He can have a nice supper and wait till he's had a chance to enjoy everything and then I'll dish out his beans for him. I don't want him to be distracted by hunger.

== 8:30pm ==

At last! Each taster gets six bowls. Since there are only five preparations, that means each taster will have at least one matching pair and could have as many as five bowls all the same, or three pairs, or some other weird combination that would never arise if you assigned the bowls by some other means than random.

I told Mark to pick six numbers from (1) to (24). He picked (1), (2), (3), (4), (5), and (6). So I've dished his beans out according to the plan I made earlier: (1) #25; (2) #62; (3) #25; (4) #88; (5) #88; and (6) #93. Just as I was saying, he has two pairs, (1)-(3) and (4)-(5).

His first task is to figure out which bowls match. Then he gets to say which he likes most.

== 8:35pm ==

He's just sitting there, lifting the different bowls and examining them under the light.

== 8:40pm ==

I'm getting a stomach ache.

== 8:45pm ==

I'm tasting some straight out of the pots to get some idea what's going through his head.

Feh!

Undersalted cold beans are disgusting. I'd better offer people condiments.

== 8:50pm ==

Mark says the beans fall into two groups, the salted and the not salted enough. He wishes there were more beans to taste, so he could go back and forth more. And he says that the different color casts of the different white and whitish and creamy-white bowls make it impossible to judge the appearance of the samples. In future it would be much better to serve all the samples in the same dishes.

Friday, 2 May 2008
== 8:30am ==

Dear Bean Diary:

OK, I can serve more beans to today's tasters, and I can give them salt and other condiments, but I really don't think the dishes could matter that much, could they?

Now that I've figured out I didn't measure the salt and the water, I'm going to have to throw out these results anyway. But I want to see if this Beanathon thing is even possible.

Here's who's coming:

Angela Garbes writes mostly about restaurants for the rowdier of our two weekly newspapers here in Seattle, The Stranger, although I realized looking back over her work that the first piece of hers I noticed a lovely little thing she did about Elizabeth Bishop.

I'm drawn to her restaurant reviews because she's interested in all kinds of food, from the exotic to the plain, she cares about the food in restaurants more than the decor or the crowd, she eats in restaurants but she cooks too. In addition to all that foody stuff, moreover, she's a real writer. Her pieces aren't just plopped out, they're composed. Even when I couldn't care less about some restaurant she's covering, I'll always read her piece just for the fun of seeing how she's put it together.

I have never laid eyes on her or exchanged e-mails with her before I invited her earlier this week to the first Beanathon tasting, but I'm pretty sure she's going to be a good person to help me get started.

My other taster is the distinguished playwright Scot Augustson. The slightly out-of-date bio fails to reveal some of Scot's latest triumphs, Girls and Gods, or, Prometheus Unwed and A Boy in the Beastly City, and above all the script for The Lethal Cotillion, which won "Best in the U.S." in the 48-Hour Film competition and will be shown at Cannes film festival in two weeks.

Scot has eaten at my house and I've eaten at his times without number. He and I share a liking for messing around in the kitchen -- "The recipe says do A? What would happen if we did B instead" -- and we both have spouses who do not like messing around. My Mark and Scot's Jeff are both terrific cooks, but they like to follow recipes and come up with predictable results, and they get nervous when we prance around tossing in a dash of this and a splash of that.

I'm setting all of this out for you, dear Bean Diary, so you can see that if the great alteRecipes Beanathon is going to go anywhere, these are the right people to get it started.

== 9:00am ==

Too soon to dish out the bowls?

Too soon. I've put out salt, black pepper, paprika, red pepper, chipotle pepper, Sriracha, soy sauce, fish sauce, garlic vinegar, a lemon ... That's all I can think of for now.

== 9:30am ==

Too soon to dish out the bowls?

Too soon.

== 10:30am ==

Now I can dish out the bowls.

(7) #75, (8) #25, (9) #62 ...

I'm dizzy. How can a sensible person care this much about beans, for heaven's sake? Shouldn't I be trying to cure cancer or promote world peace?

== 11:00am ==

The doorbell.

It's Angela. As soon as we shake hands, I feel totally relaxed. That's a lie. But I do feel more relaxed than before I opened the door. She's not 8 feet tall and grumpy, which I had somehow talked myself into fearing. She says her last name is pronounced GAHR-bays, no rolled R. (In my mind, I had been saying garbs.)

And then one minute later, it's Scot.

We chat for three minutes and then Angela chooses the first six bowls. Scot chooses the second six, and the remaining six are for me. I've got (9), (10), (16), (19), (21), and (22). I search my memory to see if I have any faint notion of what went into those six bowls. I have not.

== 11:07am ==

I get two more salt cellars so we each have one.

== 11:09am ==

Angela asks if we can have some water. Water! A palate cleanser! Why didn't I think of that? I get a pitcher of water from the refrigerator and some small glasses. That's why she's a professional restaurant reviewer and I am a schlub.

== 11:12am ==

All six bowls of beans taste horrible. Angela and Scot are just being polite. They can hardly wait to run out the door and puke beans out all over the sidewalk.

== 11:15am ==

They keep writing things down. What are they writing down? I'm not writing anything down. I wrote down "Salty," "A little salty," "Whoa, not salty at all." But now, like a fool, I have put enough salt in everything so it's all salty enough, and now I really can't tell anything apart. Which two were my obligatory pair before I started putting all this damned salt in? Do I have more matches than the obligatory pair?

== 11:17am ==

I can't get over how gracious they both are, how seriously they're treating their six little bowls of beans.

They're really doing it. They're not pretending, they're not showing off, they're really working hard at tasting the beans.

== 11:21am ==

I tell them not to try to rank all six, just say their favorite and their second favorite.

My favorite is (21). My second favorite is (22) -- but that's after I salted it. What would my second favorite have been if I hadn't salted anything?

I thought (9) and (16) were the same way back at the beginning, but now of course I have no idea and I can't go back and check because I salted everything. No, wait, I didn't salt (9) and (16) because I was sure they matched and they were never going to be my favorite. So I can taste them again.

Bean fatigue sets in rather quickly. They're not using any of the condiments, so I guess I shouldn't either.

== 11:25am ==

They're looking hard at the beans in the bowls, just the way Mark did.

== 11:28am ==

Some of these beans are delicious.

== 11:35am ==

It's over. They've written everything down, now they want to see what went into which bowls.

And now, dearest Bean Diary, you're not going to believe what happens. We talk. The three of us sit and talk for half an hour, and mostly we talk about beans.

We talk, all three of us, about how we came to beans only as adults. We weren't raised eating them, and we feel clever for having discovered them on our own. We talk about dried beans versus canned beans in a relaxed and loving way, no defensiveness, no pretensions. Scot tells us about using canned refried beans as a general-purpose thickener.

We talk about the Beanathon.

They agree with Mark that the beans have to be served all in only one kind of bowl. That makes me sad, because my mental image has always been that dizzying swirl of different little white bowls, but of course science must win out. I'm going to have to get some from a restaurant supply house. If only I had known when I was in China, I could have gotten them for a penny apiece.

They point out the importance of the broth, which I hadn't really thought about, how crucial it is that all the samples have similar distribution of bean and broth. Maybe if I swirl up the beans in the pot and then spoon from the middle of the stir ... More methodological work is needed, I can see that.

They urge me to control for the amount and temperature of the broth.

We hypothesize that different methods may be suitable for different kinds of beans -- that today's work on great northerns might have no bearing on teparies or pintos.

I confess my lack of rigor in failing to measure the water and the salt. We agree that today's results must be thrown out, but that they are heartening nonetheless. Each of us ranked #93 as either favorite or second favorite. Furthermore, each of them ranked #25 least favorite (I didn't have a #25).

We enlarge on other kinds of basic cooking about which cooks have wildly divergent ideas. How to cook rice. How to cook a hard-boiled egg.

== 12:20pm ==

And now, dear Bean Diary, we have talked enough, we've agreed that we'll meet again for the next chapter of the Beanathon, we've embraced as only people can who have shared their innermost thoughts and feelings about beans, I thank them from the bottom of my heart and lock the door behind them.

Like a girl in a teen movie, I twirl around, lean back against the door, and look starry-eyed up at the ceiling. The prom! The Beanathon!

Saturday, 3 May 2008
== 1:30pm ==

Dear Bean Diary:

white bean soup

remains of five pots of beans all cooked different ways, braised pea sprouts, three small pieces of salami chopped fine, two scallions horse-ear cut, chile sesame oil

Pour and scrape the remains into one of the five pots, stir in the pea sprouts and the salami, heat the mixture to piping hot, being careful not to burn the beans, stir in the scallions and chile sesame oil, enjoy.

[If you live in Seattle or you're planning to visit and you'd like to participate in a Beanathon tasting, send us mail.]

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