Bean-o, Anyone?

A few months ago I planned a Relief Society activity all about using dried beans.  It turned out really well and I thought I had discovered several new recipes to use all those dried beans in my food storage.  One of the discoveries I made was that it's possible to put dried beans in a jar, fill it with water, and then pressure cook/can it so you have your own canned beans.  With the multitude of #10 cans of dried beans in my food storage, this really excited me! 

Thursday and Friday of last week Ben was home sick, so I decided to finally learn how to use the pressure cooker my mother in law gave me for Christmas.  I started with beans.  First,  I read the directions for the pressure cooker and even did a little test with water to see how it works.  It was very exciting to watch the pressure build on the pressure gauge, then see the little rocker thingy on the top start rocking when it got up to 15 lbs. pressure.  It rocked away for several minutes and kept the pressure steady without blowing up!  Success!

Then I got out the recipe for canning dried beans and set to work.  The beans are supposed to cook at 15 lbs. pressure for 75 minutes.  By the time the pressure built up, the 75 mins. passed, and the cool down process was complete, it took about 2 1/2 hours.  A lot faster than soaking beans over night, then cooking them for a few hours!  But when I took them out of the canner, they looked like mush, or refried beans!  Not the texture I was hoping for.  And three of the six jars didn't seal, which was a huge disappointment.  I've never had problems with sealing jars when I use the boiling water bath method of canning. 

I talked to a friend about why they didn't seal and she walked me through the process of canning with a pressure cooker.  Apparently, you have to cover the jars with water, just like in a boiling water bath.  In the recipe I had, it said, "Add water to the depth of 1" for small canners and 2" for large canners."  To me, a novice pressure-cookerer, I thought this meant add 2" of water.  I guess not!  When I re-read the directions that came with the pressure cooker, it said to add three quarts of water.  So that's way more than 2"!  I don't know if that will solve the problem of the mushy beans, but I'll give it a try if I ever have another day stuck at home.

So what to do with six pint jars of mushy beans? Try out some of the bean recipes I discovered for the Relief Society activity! 

Black Bean Brownies were first on my list.  I remember them being delicious and not much different than regular brownies.  Wrong.  At least the ones I made.  First of all, don't eat them right out of the oven!  The bean flavor is overpowering.  When they cooled, the flavor was much better, but they definitely had a strange after taste.  On the plus side, they are gluten and dairy free, so if you have those issues, you might not think they're that bad.  I passed them on to my lactose-intolerant sister, via my mom, so I don't know what she thought of them. 

Applesauce Spice Pinto Bean Cake was next.  This also tasted fabulous at the RS activity.  It's full of good things:  honey, wheat flour, raisins, walnuts, applesauce, and oh yeah, pinto beans!  Ben was my only child who would even try it (I didn't even tell any of them that it had beans in it and they still wouldn't try it, it looks that nasty!) and he said, "The flavor is OK, but the texture is confusing my taste buds." I couldn't agree more!

I still want to try Harvest Pumpkin Bars, which use white bean puree, but shouldn't I have learned my lesson by now?