Beans: Varieties

In his explorations, Christopher Columbus encountered fields of beans of a variety never before seen in the Old World. The genus Phaseolus was then unique to the Western Hemisphere, and encompasses most of the dried bean varieties that are now essential to Western cuisine, such as kidney, pinto, black, and white (including its many popular variants like navy, great northern, and cannellini).

Scientific classification aside, between the New World and the Old, an adventurous chef will never run out of leguminous adventures. Due to the logistical complexities of storing and rotating food, however, we have confined ourselves to less than a dozen key varieties in this course. Even so, the endless smorgasbord of different bean dishes you could make from these alone is dizzying. We teach you to make cornerstone bean dishes from:

• White beans, including

  • Great northern beans

  • Cannellini

• Kidney beans

• Black (turtle) beans

• Pinto beans

• Chick peas (AKA garbanzo beans)

• Pigeon peas

• Split peas

All of these are available both dried and canned. The two forms are fairly interchangeable in the kitchen, the only real difference being that since canned beans are already cooked, they enable you to skip several preparatory steps that dried beans require, and may also require less cooking time.

Another bean preparation worth considering in your storage pantry is dried refried bean flakes. They’re almost as quick to prepare as canned refried beans, and they sidestep the hardening problem that can ruin whole dried beans after years in storage.