apartment therapy changing the world, one room at a time

If you use canned beans, it helps to discard the cooking liquid that they are canned in.

Good luck! I battle this myself and have never found a surefire solution. Even so I end up eating beans a couple of days a week because they're so cheap and delish and easy. I've heard various theories--eat beans at lunch when your digestive track is "strongest," canned beans and their liquid (as OneEyedMan mentions above) are worse than beans just cooked, if you eat a high fiber diet eat small meals throughout the day to aid digestion (I do find that this makes a difference for my veggie diet), and finally don't cook beans in their soaking water and once they come to a boil skim off the foam. I do find that drinking a spicy chai or ginger tea after a bean filled meal does seem to aid digestion.

Baking soda - my mother swears by it. No more than 1/8 of a teaspon for a large pot of beans. I grew up on a Central American diet (read: black beans every day) and I never really had any issues until my diet changed (moving to Canada will do that to you) but I found that once I got back into the habit of eating lots of beans, my problems disappeared (thank you, meat-reduced rich-in-beans diet!). Moral of the story: introduce beans slowly into your diet and your digestive track will thank you, and so will your significant other(s).

Agree with rinsing canned beans---it makes a huge difference, don't know about dried.

Since I started eating lots of greens, it has helped with the beans. Also, I do use a product called beano (use it and there will be no gas) which helps reduce or eliminate much of the gas and discomfort that can be associated with bean/fibre consumption.

Eating beans creates 'wind' because they contains small chains of carbohydrates (called oligosaccharides), which some people cannot digest efficiently until the 'end' (where bacteria residing at the end of the gut takes over). Thus, tooting.

Beans soaked overnight in water and then cooked and drained contain less of these carbs. The precooking, quick-soak, method, consisting of a one-minute boil followed by a soak for an hour, is even more effective, but it can compromise the texture of your beans. If you're eating canned beans, definitely strain and rinse.

Start with small servings until you know how each dish affects you. Good luck!

Skimming off the bubbly "scum" that floats to the top of the pot when you first boil beans also helps a lot in my experience.

I'm with Steve--the Rancho Gordo cooking instructions indicate that the best way to help the gas is to eat more beans.

As newbie veggies, my husband and I suffered through many bad "kale nights" or "bean nights", but, like morphomercedes, we found that eating high-fiber "gassy" foods regularly helps your system cope much better. Now we eat beans n' greens two or three (or more) times a week, and no problems.

I think soaking beans definitely helps, but there is something to the fiber argument, also. I eat an extremely high-fiber diet now, but it took time to adjust.

To cook dried beans, I soak them for 8-24 hours, rinse them thoroughly, then slow cook them for 8 hours on low. This has been the most effective thing for me to increase their digestibility. Note: don't do this with red kidney beans.

Epazote has been effective for me, fresh or dried. The health food store also sells a Beano-like produce called "Say Yes to Beans!" that I like.

Different kinds of legumes also have different levels of effect. "Passionate Vegetarian" by Crescent Dragonwagon" has a list of types of legumes from "most digestible" to "least digestible." It seems accurate to me.

I think I lean towards Steve Sando's suggestions.

I’ve been an ovo-lacto vegetarian for 40 years and beans are a big part of my diet.

My less veggie inclined friends have those digestion complaints regarding beans but it’s a foreign condition for me, perhaps that is because of the large amount of fiber in my diet over many years.

I've been told repeatedly by others that my digestive issues with beans are because I "don't eat enough of them," and I've come to regard it as an old wives' tale (at least in my case). We frequently ate beans when I was growing up (and I still do), so I didn't see how that could be the problem. And why did we eat beans so frequently? Because my mother was raised on a farm in the Depression years where the primary crop was...beans! My mother ate beans day in and day out because that's all they had. And did I mention that she has the same digestive issues as I do with beans? Figure that one out for me.

Adding to morpho's comment - a pinch of baking soda will also help the beans cook faster. (I never knew it was supposed to be an anti-gas aid.)

Adding to lotusmoss's comment - if you find ginger to be helpful to you, you can also try adding it directly to the beans at about a teaspoon per half a pound. It's also very delicious. (In fact, I ate so many black-eyed peas once, the ginger gave me more gas, not less.)

Adding to gquaker's comment re: small amounts at first - My mom insists that your stomach needs to adjust to your food. If you eat a food infrequently, you won't have enough of the digestive enzymes to break it down. I think there might be some truth to it. I don't typically have problems with beans (after readjusting to the black-eyed peas, that is). Eating too much meat or fat, however, gives me indigestion like you wouldn't believe.

Does anyone know what deliciousness is represented in the photo?

My family is from Brazil and we eat a lot of beans, mainly pinto bean and occasionally black beans. The beans are soaked overnight. This definitely helps lighten the load. Also beans should be accompanied by greens and something citric to help digestion. We normally eat a bit of kale on the side, sauteed in a tad of oil and a bit of garlic and finish off with some orange slices.

Take beano! Really, it does wonders.

Shayna, that's just a basic bowl of pot beans, cooked with shallots and sage, and with some olive oil and Parmesan on top. You can see them here too:

How to Cook Beans

Asafetida is a spice that is commonly sold in Indian markets that works extremely well. Indians eat probably more beans than any culture in the world(Dal is the national dish), and this is what they commonly use in recipes to aid in digestion.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asafoetida

I think most people can build up to digesting beans sans beano or other extraordinary efforts. I eat a good deal of beans and other high fiber foods with no issue. When my husband and I first started dating he did not adhere so kindly to my diet, but now it is not an issue for him. Start eating this stuff the night before you have a day off of work and deal with the gas. You will hopefully build up to not having it affect you.

Here is an awesome easy recipe I like. I finish it off with a squeeze of lime when I serve.

http://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/Kemps-Black-Beans-238086

I always either rinse canned beans before cooking and/or drain the soaking water (dried beans) and cook in fresh water.

Also, your post was delicately worded enough that I'm not certain that your issue is with excess gas. However, if it is - make sure to examine the rest of your diet and make sure you're not blaming the beans unfairly. Most people don't realize that dried fruits can have more of an effect than beans. Ditto for carbonated beverages, which are even worse if you sip them through a straw.

Epazote! Epazote! Epazote!

Seriously, this stuff works miracles on my beans & my gut! No one will ever know what you've eaten. ;-)

Just a tsp or 2 when the beans (1 Lb.) are done cooking is enough for us. The taste is very mild and akin to vaguely thyme-ish, maybe barely sweet. It's great in soups, casseroles, purees, etc.

I get mine dried from Penzey's.

http://www.penzeys.com/cgi-bin/penzeys/p-penzeysepazote.html

To all the people saying you have to build up to beans: although this is true, be careful not to extrapolate too far from your own experience. I know I ate a lot more beans in college than I had at home, and I had issues that went away after I became adjusted to beans. But many people have more complex digestive issues, some of which are undiagnosed or fairly mild in effect, and for those people, beans are a particularly problematic food. Beano can help a lot, but if you have IBD or other diseases that affect the disgestive track, it might be best to avoid beans. My husband can't touch them at all.

anntlope,

Mine was referring to gas, and I assumed the original post was, too.

I agree with what you're saying about checking the rest of your diet. I blamed the problem totally on beans, but then I also figured out I have issues with onions and cruciferous vegetables, which sometimes end up in the same dish as beans. I miss onions a lot less than I miss beans, though, so I'll sometimes forgo those.

Beano is natural, so it's not like taking a drug or something

Alton Brown/Good Eats suggests a few drops of "an enzyme called, alphagalactosidase, which can digest oligosaccharides." He explains that some oligosaccharides get removed when you throw out the soaking water, but it's negligible. Alphagalactosidase is what's in Beano, but I haven't had much luck with it. Or maybe I have, and it could be much worse...

In France this is what I do : I soak dried beans overnight or longer, changing the water if I can.

Then, and this is supposed to do the trick.... is I put them in my pressure cooker, cover them with COLD water (no more than a third of the pressure cooker should be filled check with manufacturer's instructions) then let the heat build under pressure, and cook for 5-10 minutes once the thingy turns from the pressure. Once you can open the cooker, strain and rinse the beans, rinse the cooker well, put the beans inside with an onion with cloves stuck in them, some garlic cloves, some pepper, no salt and cover with HOT water - no more than a third of the cooker - see above) and then cook required time..... 35 minutes for my cooker.

Then I strain and put in whatever I make, chili (red beans) or cassoulet - white lingo beans (like tonight as a matter of fact) and they are more digestable if not perfect...

I agree the more you eat them the better you feel!!!!!!!

When I ate my traditional New Year's black eyed peas with friends, I didn't have a gas problem. My friend says it's because he put dried mustard (about 1 tsp I think) in the pot.

Now, after reading this, it could also have been the copious amounts of collard and mustard greens we also ate with the meal.

Rinse, rinse, rinse. I use both canned beans and cooked, frozen, and thawed fresh beans and rinse both thoroughly in warm and cold water until the foaming stops. Washing away the starch helps immensely, but I also eat beans fairly regularly.

Also, vegetarians should notice that beano contains gelatin. If you want to go that route, enzyme complexes (usually found at natural food stores) help too. Just check the ingredients or look for ones labeled as vegan-friendly.

From what I've read/seen, all (or at least most!) native cultures soak beans before preparing them. Soaking some varieties with whey can help break them down a bit. But to all those who said they soak overnight (or longer), I absolutely agree. It makes a huge difference for me.