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Why beans deserve a bigger spot on your plate.
Available on Apple and Spotify.
“Let’s have beans for every meal!” You may recognize that as the end of a silly schoolyard tune, but after listening to this episode, you’ll be chanting it for another reason.
Victoria Riskin sits down with one of our most prolific Bluedot Living Kitchen contributors, Caroline Saunders (check out her work here), to talk all about beans. Chickpeas, lentils, black beans, and even lesser-known varieties, like tepary beans, are climate super stars: They’re great for soil health, provide a good source of fiber and protein, require a fraction of the carbon emissions needed for animal products, and are extremely affordable.
In this episode, Caroline tells us the bean she can’t stop buying and shares easy dinner ideas. “Hearing about how something as simple as a drought-resistant tepary bean or a vibrant red lentil soup can nourish both our bodies and the soil was a total revelation,” Victoria says.
In This Episode, You’ll Hear:
- The debate between canned beans and dried beans
- Why legumes are good for soil health
- Chickpea dinner ideas and pantry cooking
- How to make homemade hummus and add flavor upgrades
- All about tepary beans and Indigenous food traditions
- What’s so good about black beans, sofrito, and comfort meals
- Why it’s worth giving lentils a second chance
About Caroline Saunders:
Caroline Saunders is a strategy and operations leader working at the intersection of media, climate, and sustainable food systems. She is the managing director and editor-in-chief of The SUNN Post, a national nonprofit student newspaper amplifying young voices. Previously, she served as chief of staff at Grist, and she has written about sustainable food for outlets like The Guardian, Bluedot Living Kitchen, and SAVEUR. She also holds a pastry diploma from Le Cordon Bleu Paris, bringing a unique perspective to food and sustainability.
Meet the Host:
I am Victoria. I’m always looking for the best life has to offer despite a turbulent world. I find comfort in the environment and joy in friendships. We have a great team of all ages at Bluedot who inspire me every day as we work together to build community.
Transcript
Victoria Riskin: Welcome to Bluedot Imagine If podcast. I'm Victoria Riskin, and I'm the founder of Bluedot Living. I am here today to offer you some ideas for your pantry and some easy ways to cook and save you money, which is very important right now, and care for the planet all at the same time.
It's a tall order, but we can do it. So I created the Imagine If mini-series called Pantry to Dinner. To guide us, I'm so happy to have with me Caroline Saunders, to explore with me simple ingredients and some small shifts in how to have less waste, a healthier kitchen, and a delicious meal. Caroline is a regular contributor to the Bluedot Living Kitchen newsletter and our magazine, which you can find in the link in the show notes. I love her writing, so let's welcome her. Welcome back, Caroline. I'm so happy to have you.
Caroline Saunders: Thank you. I'm so thrilled to be here. Yeah.
Victoria Riskin: Good. So last time we talked, we ended the conversation about beans. You said you wanted to imagine if people really understood and appreciated beans — how healthy they are for the soil and how wonderful they are to eat. So flash forward, we're together today with our mini-series called Pantry to Dinner.
I went out to the store, and I bought a bunch of cans of beans. I also have some of these lovely packaged beans. Does it make a difference whether the beans you use are from a can or from a package like this, or is it essentially equivalent? Because the time it takes to cook the raw ones is not inconsequential, and we want to get to dinner, right? So can we start right there?
Caroline Saunders: Totally. It's a great question, and it's one I've thought about in my own cooking and have also looked up expert culinary takes on. If you go and you read Kenji López-Alt, for instance, on this question, he points out rightly that there is a flavor advantage to starting from dried beans and cooking them. He also brought up the specific example of hummus: If you make hummus from canned chickpeas, you can get a little bit of the canned flavor, and that mostly comes from the water. So there is a way to shortcut around that.
But the short answer is, from a flavor perspective, yeah, you probably do get a little more mileage from starting from dried. However — big caveat — I barely, almost never, pretty much never do that because of what you said around the time. It's just so time-consuming. In a perfect world, I'm soaking beans overnight multiple times a month and tending to them in the morning for multiple hours on the stove. But I don't often find that can happen in practice, so I would say canned is pretty darn good.
Victoria Riskin: OK. Thank you. Thank you so much. I've done it both ways, and I love being liberated. But there may be some things you want to do with the can because sometimes they put a lot of salt in it to preserve it. So maybe what do you do there? Do you rinse them a little bit?
Caroline Saunders: Totally. I think it depends a bit on the recipe. Sometimes I find that salt to be useful. It's always such a good rule of thumb in cooking, of course, to just taste your baseline ingredient, and if they do taste super salty, it might be good to rinse them. Normally I don't worry about it, and if I'm making something like Cuban black beans — which I literally made a couple days ago and now I'm going to make again today because it was so good — I find that salt to be an advantage.
I will be mindful of cutting the salt that is called for in the recipe. But it can be helpful sometimes in certain recipes, like hummus, to rinse and ditch that canned liquid up front so that you have a purer flavor, which also brings you back more, like you were saying, to square one on salt, which can be helpful.
Victoria Riskin: OK, so let's dive into garbanzos. They're so wonderful.
Caroline Saunders: I would say garbanzo beans are my most fundamental pantry staple. There was this amazing article in The New York Times Veggie newsletter a few years ago called “Chickpea Anxiety” that really captured how I feel about chickpeas when I'm in a grocery store. When I'm walking down the aisle at Trader Joe's or wherever, I'm like, “I don't know how many cans of chickpeas I have at home,” and that makes me anxious because I always want to have them on hand because they're so useful.
So then I get like three more cans, and then I come home and I already had six, and then I have just this insane cavalcade of chickpeas. They're great from a usefulness perspective in cooking because they can be used in so many different ways. From a health perspective and an environmental perspective, like all legumes and beans, they're high in protein — pretty much as high as you can get for plant-based protein — so they're really important for plant-based and vegetarian diets.
They have a ton of soluble and insoluble fiber, also super important for health in so many ways, and just lots of little nutrients that are really important. They're just a health powerhouse. They're super good for you. They don't have the saturated and scary fats that a lot of animal proteins do have. And then climate-wise, the big thing with chickpeas and all legumes is that they just take a fraction of the carbon emissions. For beef, we're talking like 50 to 100 times less. With chicken, it's like three to five times less — still really meaningful — and water, too. It's like a tenth of the water.
And that's before, like you were saying, in terms of soil benefits. Nitrogen fixation is what happens with legumes, and so that is super important for soil health and can be uptaken by other crops later, which is why you often see them in crop rotations. Earlier in my career, I was doing a lot of reporting on farms for a while, and so I got really familiar with crop rotations. Often it'll be a season of one crop and then a season of a leguminous crop. They'll let the whole field get fertilized that way.
Victoria Riskin: Fantastic. So it's a win-win-win in terms of health, in terms of the environment, and in terms of taste. I'd love to hear some of your favorite garbanzo recipes.
Caroline Saunders: OK. I would say in my rotation multiple times a month are some kind of chickpea sheet pan dinner. I love a quick plug-and-play dinner that is all on one tray and is going to get the job done but is big in flavor. There are two classics that I feel like listeners might really enjoy, if you're not already familiar with them from The New York Times Cooking.
One of them is a feta bake with chickpeas and tomatoes, but you can sub all sorts of stuff. It's profoundly riffable, which is the big appeal. You can put in dates, you can put in cauliflower, you can put in olives. And then there's a similar one — this really great recipe for the chickpea and honeynut squash bake, which is also a sheet pan thing. You can also use any orange root vegetable in place of honeynut squash; I often use sweet potatoes with cilantro and yogurt. It's super spicy, super light, and refreshing.
Victoria Riskin: Sounds amazing. What kind of spice do you throw in there? You said spicy, so what's the spice there?
Caroline Saunders: Yeah, so that one is hot honey, which is so fun.What I normally do is red pepper flakes and honey, just the easy way if you don't have it on hand. And then the other one that is the more riffable version that's feta and chickpeas and tomatoes calls for your favorite spice mix to be added. I often use garam masala, but you can use ras el hanout. I know that's a favorite of yours.
Victoria Riskin: It is. Yep, yep. So hummus — everybody has hummus at every single party, and I have to say, sometimes I think, “Oh, it's missing something. It's not working quite right.” One of my favorites is one done by Joan Nathan. She does Middle Eastern Jewish cooking and uses preserved lemons. What are your thoughts about hummus?
Caroline Saunders: Yeah. I am sometimes in love with hummus and sometimes lukewarm on it. I think it's because I grew up eating the very one-note store-bought brands. The real truth of it is I finally had good hummus at a Middle Eastern restaurant one time, and I was like, “Oh, that's what this is supposed to taste like.”
Victoria Riskin: Right.
Caroline Saunders: And so I have made it a few times myself and have liked it way better when it's homemade. A variation that I actually have on my list to try soon is a recipe for harissa and mint, which is apparently a classic flavor combination for hummus. I thought that sounded really good.
Victoria Riskin: Yeah. I think there's so much you can do with it, and frankly, it's rare to have great hummus. I think you have to make it yourself. I hate to say that to our audience who are looking for easy things to do, but if you make a big batch of it, it lasts all week. You can pepper it with other things, you can spice it up, and you can throw in a little cayenne or something to give it more punch.
Caroline Saunders: The other thing I feel like I just have to put out into the universe about chickpeas is that the chickpea water can be a crucial ingredient in vegan chocolate mousse. In other words, you can make the most phenomenal vegan chocolate mousse with just chocolate chips (which can be vegan, or if what you have on hand is not vegan, cool), chickpea water, a little bit of sugar just to balance things out, and a smidge of lemon juice.
We have a recipe for that on Bluedot. That's one of mine. It's so interesting to me. I went to pastry school and I've thought hard about vegan replacements for things. Chickpea water works because it has all these different compounds in it that create a foam, but it works to make meringues and moussey textures in certain situations and not others. So it's not a perfect one-to-one for something like egg whites. Anyway, this chocolate mousse is so good that my non-vegan friends, when I serve it to them for a dinner party, they're like, “This is incredible.” And then I tell them it's vegan, and they're shocked.
Victoria Riskin: Oh my gosh! So Caroline, you mentioned to me a bean I had never heard of — not that I've heard of all beans. It's called tepary?
Caroline Saunders: Yeah, totally. OK, so this was a new bean to me too as of three weeks ago, which was very exciting. I am always absolutely jazzed to learn about a new bean. I came across tepary beans through reading this cookbook called A Feather and a Fork by Crystal Wahpepah, who is this amazing Indigenous chef based in Oakland, California, and has a restaurant called Wahpepah's Kitchen.
Tepary beans are a mainstay in her cooking at her restaurant. They anchor this really amazing, for instance, “three sisters” veggie bowl that she has that spotlights squash, hominy, and beans, and just this gorgeous rainbow of vegetables. But tepary beans, she writes — and I did some research — are Indigenous to the Sonoran Desert region and have been cultivated and used by Native peoples in that area for at least 1,000 years, probably longer.
Because these beans came of age in this desert environment, they understandably are super well adapted to climate extremes. They can withstand crazy heat. They can go without water. And so they've been recognized by all these sorts of biodiversity entities as quite a promising and important bean as we think about climate change and intensification there.
I'm always just super intrigued by these sorts of varieties of crops that not only have these environmental advantages but are anchors — they were and are so important culturally, particularly in Indigenous culinary foodways. Just through colonization and all these different forces, they have been sort of forgotten or forcibly forgotten, except by the people trying to very importantly keep their food cultures alive. So anyway, I went down a rabbit hole on these beans and am now completely obsessed.
Victoria Riskin: First of all, let me just say that I think it's so rich to appreciate food traditions, and the Indigenous traditions are just feathering their way back into food consciousness. There are a couple of important Indigenous food chefs who've won James Beard Awards, and I think that's because they bring something to the table that is important to our history, our land, our shared space, and the way they think about food and how they handle food. So that's wonderful. What kind of a flavor does this tepary have?
Caroline Saunders: It's a pretty creamy bean. It tasted to me good and beany, and I was just kind of like, “Yeah, great bean.” But what's interesting — and I haven't tried all the varieties and flavors, so I feel like there could be multiple flavors — is that they're really pretty. They come in these different colors of shades of white and mottled brown and black and this mottled cranberry color. Then the cranberry one kind of softens toward this brown color after you cook it. As with many interesting heritage native Indigenous varieties of pulses, definitely the color can often be an indicator of flavor, so I'm really curious to try the other colors that I haven't tried.
Victoria Riskin: See if they have the same flavor. They certainly would look pretty on a plate, wouldn't they, if they were together? But I wonder how we can get them because I don't think they're so commonplace in, well, at least in my grocery store.
Caroline Saunders: Yeah, right, because they're not produced at a massive industrial scale or anything, for sure. So folks can definitely get them through Rancho Gordo. And then also there's a really cool Indigenous producer I want to shout out called Ramona Farms, who is farming on land where these have been grown for a long time. There are lots of other small specialty producers, but those are two good places.
Victoria Riskin: They've put together some things in the Bluedot Living store, and Rancho Gordo — we have a collection of their beans. I've been using these beans for a long time and they're terrific and healthy, and they taste super clean. I don't know any other way to say it; it's just like they're unadulterated. So whether it's from Ramona Farms or from our store, which we can also put in the show notes.
I want to just chat with you because you had a little pushback when we talked earlier about butter beans.
Caroline Saunders: Out of fear.
Victoria Riskin: So I said “butter beans,” and you said, “Aren't those limas?” and “Yuck.”
Caroline Saunders: I did say I was so scared of them.
Victoria Riskin: You were like, “Oh, she's going down lima beans.” I do not like lima beans. Sorry, lima bean fans, but I don't like them either, and Caroline doesn't like them. We've just offended all the lima bean fans, right? I'm sure there's some good lima bean recipes.
But butter beans are very buttery, and that's why they are so named. There's a restaurant that I love to go to, and I always order it: the salad is chopped lettuce, butter beans, and little tiny chopped red onion in a very lovely white wine vinaigrette. I make a beeline for that restaurant so I can have the butter bean salad. So I just felt that you should know that I could bring something to you because you're always bringing such great things to me.
Caroline Saunders: Thanks, Vicki. And you're also dramatically lowering my fear since I now know that these are not lima…but you said they're a more mature form of lima beans. Is that right?
Victoria Riskin: That's what it said when I looked it up: that as they develop, they lose that kind of gritty and not-so-good flavor. That's what's so great about nature; it can magically transform into something really beautiful. A little like artichokes, which taste good, and then the flower is magnificent.
Take one more stab at beans. Is there another bean, like black beans? You were saying you were gonna make that for dinner, so I want to hear what's for dinner.
Caroline Saunders: Yes. So what's for dinner tonight is a repeat of what I made two nights ago because it was so good. I think black beans were the first beans that I ate and were the important beans in my family's pantry growing up. So they feel like home base to me. Whenever I think of comfort cooking, I think of black beans. I've made them a lot of ways — obviously, you can make salads. My family has a bunch of quick black bean recipes that are a very simple riff on a Cuban version.
But making them the real way with an awesome Cuban black bean recipe where you make the sofrito with green bell peppers and onions and spices, and then you cook the beans with a lot of those same ingredients too, and then you add in the sofrito, you add white wine…
Victoria Riskin: Sofrito — help me with that.
Caroline Saunders: Sofrito is this really interesting base. I think it's used in multiple big food cultures, but certainly Cuban. You know how in France there's the mirepoix? In all these different cultures, there are these bases of chopped-up and cooked vegetables, and you add that as a flavor base. Sofrito is that in Cuban cooking, and it's a combination of finely chopped bell pepper, onion, garlic, and some key spices. You cook that all, and then you add that to the beans once they've done a certain amount of cooking.
Victoria Riskin: Just hearing you is mouth-watering, I have to say. OK, is there anything else in the bean department — pintos or anything else — that you want to close with for our pantry?
Caroline Saunders: Great question. So many beans are flashing before my eyes.
Victoria Riskin: Let's see. Do you like garbanzo?
Caroline Saunders: Let's see. I feel like we have to shout out the humble lentil.
Victoria Riskin: What was I thinking, right?
Caroline Saunders: How could we not? There's so much to say, I don't even know where to begin. But in brief, I think I grew up a lentil hater because I thought that all there was in the world were these green lentils that had this kind of muddy taste to them. I'm sure I was just bastardizing the intended cooking process, so let's be clear about that.
But for me, it was a revelation to discover French green lentils — those Puy lentils — which have a cleaner taste and which I really love using in lentil salads with a really bright, citrusy sherry vinaigrette. And then it's also been huge to learn more about how to use red lentils, which now I feel like I use in soups and dahls all the time.
Victoria Riskin: I love red lentils versus other lentils. I love them because I make lentil salads with them and the citrusy sherry and bread. So if I were to pick my favorite soup, it would be red lentil soup. The New York Times has a very good recipe, and I fiddle around with that. But it is lovely, rich, and nutritious. I don't know if it has a little sherry in it, maybe. But I love red lentil soup. It's one of my go-tos. When you're having people for dinner, it's not hard to make, and you get lots of oohs and aahs, and that's what we go for, right?
Thank you so much for joining us. It's been wonderful to chat with you. I can't wait to have you fix dinner for me. We have to arrange that. It's hard over Zoom, but I so appreciate your learning and your suggestions and your wisdom. Thank you. See you next time.
Caroline Saunders: Absolutely. And yours too. Yeah, we'll have to do a cooking swap one of these days.
Victoria Riskin: And the next time we get together, can we talk about grains? I think you have some good insights into grains. Are you up for that?
Caroline Saunders: Yeah, can't wait.
Victoria Riskin: Thank you for joining us on Imagine If from Bluedot Living. If you want to explore our recipes, products for your home and lifestyle, and read interesting stories, you can find us at bluedotliving.com. And for daily inspiration, you can follow us at Bluedot Living on Instagram.
If you enjoyed this conversation, share it and please add your thoughts in the comments on YouTube. I'm Victoria Riskin and we'll be back next week with more stories from great people doing amazing things in their little corner of the planet.
