Beans are a major source of dietary protein in Kenya, Malawi, Tanzania, Uganda and Zambia. Inexpensive fermentation improves the nutritional impact of flour from dry beans and improves digestibility, according to research co-authored by Emire Shimelis, from the Food Engineering Program at Addis Ababa University. The study is published in the International Journal of Food Science & Technology. Fermentation is used in some parts of Africa to improve the nutritional value of beans by removing toxins.
As illustrated by 15 bean soup, there is a great variety of beans types, including:
The following traditional uses of beans refer to the broad bean
In English usage, the word “beans” is also sometimes used to mean the seeds or pods of plants that are not in the family Leguminosae, but which bear a superficial resemblance to true beans, for example coffee beans, castor beans and cocoa beans , and vanilla beans
Many modern dry beans come from old-world varieties of broad beans, but most of the kinds commonly eaten fresh come from the Americas, being first seen by Christopher Columbus during his conquest of a region of what may have been the Bahamas, where they were grown in fields
Bean is a common name for large plant seeds of several genera of the family Fabaceae used for human food or animal feed
Cooking beans in a slow cooker, because of the lower temperatures often used, may not destroy toxins even though the beans do not smell or taste ‘bad’ . A recommended method is to boil the beans for at least ten minutes; undercooked beans may be more toxic than raw beans. Some kinds of raw beans and especially red and kidney beans, contain a harmful toxin that must be destroyed by cooking
There are over 4,000 cultivars of bean on record in the United States, alone. Beans were an important alternative source of protein throughout old and new world history, and still are today
“Bean” can be used as a near-synonym of “pulse”, an edible legume, though the term “pulses” is usually reserved for leguminous crops harvested for their dry grain and usually excludes crops mainly used for oil extraction or those used exclusively for sowing purposes . Leguminous crops harvested green for food, such as snap peas, snow peas, etc. , are classified as vegetable crops
Beans are one of the longest-cultivated plants, broad beans having been grown at least since ancient Egypt, and the common bean for six thousand years in the Americas
The term is now applied in a general way to many other related plants such as soybeans, peas, lentils, kidney beans, chickpeas , vetches and lupins. The term “bean” originally referred to the seed of the broad bean, but was later expanded to include members of the genus Phaseolus, such as the common bean and the runner bean, and the related genus Vigna
Although “beans” usually means the seeds of bean plants, it can also mean the whole young pods of bean plants, which if picked before the pods ripen and dry, can be tender enough to eat whole, whether cooked or raw. Thus the word “green beans” means “green” in the sense of unripe , as the beans inside the pods of green beans are too small to comprise a significant part of the cooked fruit
An interesting modern example of the diversity of bean use is 15 bean soup, which, as the name implies, contains literally fifteen different varieties of bean
One especially famous use of beans by pre-Columbian people is the Three Sisters method of companion plant cultivation: