Kitchen Garden Forum

Have eaten, frozen or given away so many so now want to try leaving the remainder of pods on the vines tO dry fo winter soups etc.

Have a mixture of white & black podded varieties including Cobra.
Can I use these for this purpose ? Have only ever previously tried drying a limited number of Borlotti beans which I thought were a specific drying bean rather than mainly intended for eating as a green vegetable.

I know purple kidney beans have to be boiled rapidly for ten minutes first to remove toxins but am unsure how dried French beans should be treated, especially any black ones.

Help and advice please from The Team or any forum member who has actually done this before. Thanks.
Primrose

Disappointed nobody has come up with an answer yet as to whether these beans, once removed from the pods, can be dried & used for soup. Since the heatwave most of the beans inside the pods have swelled so quickly they,ve made the beans too tough and inedible to eat pleasantly..

Sorry Primrose, I don’t know the answer!

Hi Primrose!

I had a mooch online & yes you can use them. You dry them out completely & they can then be stored in jars. Add them to cold H2O to cover & if you live in a hard water area add 1 teaspoon Bicarb of soda. Boil for at least 1hr until reconstituted; soft but not spongy, which may take longer than an hour. This then makes them ready to make things with. I found this on horfieldanddistrictallotments.co.uk. On their site they had some recipes as well.

Have you searched on here? It must have come up previously considering how long the forum has been going. I have found things by accident before, but couldn't tell you how, but someone will be able to help out giving you the links to these older sites to have a browse through & as way many more posting a few years back it could be interesting; seeing names from the past is quite weird though, wondering where they are now.

Here's one viewtopic.php?p=30533&hilit=drying+french+beans#p30533

Thanks Westi and Geoff. Really appreciate your input. I did have a brief search online but then our internet went down and my search got distracted. Hopefully will have enough beans to make a drying operation worthwhile.