Beans make you gassy, and other advice from last night's first YC dinner | Hacker News Reader

Beans make you gassy, and other advice from last night's first YC dinner

1000memories.com

82 pointsjonathanbgood34 comments

Beans make you gassy

Much less so if you soak them (ideally in a slightly caustic solution) and cook them at high temperature (i.e., boiling under pressure). The former will leach oligosaccharides, and the later will break them down.

I have a five gallon container of NaOH that I intend to make soap with one day. Should I use a little of that, or is there a more tame kitchen staple which is caustic?

"I have a five gallon container of NaOH that I intend to make soap with one day"

Don't use it without checking the MSDS to make sure it's pure. You can also buy food grade KOH from specialty food sites, which is much safer to work with. (It's commonly used to make lutefisk.)

Alternatively, you could just use Beano.

If you throw beans into concentrated NaOH they probably won't be edible any more. A pH of 8.5 is probably good -- try baking soda.

Check out what happens if you mix a very little bit of baking soda with eggs. Alkalinity speeds up maillard reactions.

Damn, I came here to post that. We eat beans all the time - soak them overnight and pressure-cook them and you'll have less gas from the beans than you would from a pizza. Rinse them once or twice while they're soaking and it'll work even better.

Hadn't heard about the caustic solution, though. What's caustic in the kitchen? Baking soda, I guess? I'm going to try that.

According to this article you normally want an acidic solution: http://www.westonaprice.org/food-features/492-putting-the-po...

No, on reading it, they also mention "the leaching out of oligosaccharides into a warm, slightly basic soak water", followed in the next paragraph of the specification of a pH between 6.5 and 9.0 ("slightly acidic to alkaline" - meaning preferably alkaline but slight acidity is OK if you don't go too far).

But wow - this is a great article!

Oh, there are actually 2 recommendations, one for oligosaccharides (as you correctly stated), but also, if you look at the sidebar: "Neutralizing Phytic Acid" It recommends soaking in an acidic solution (for that purpose). So it seems like the ideal according to this article would be to start soaking basic, then acidic, then slow cook.

That's what I get for not reading far enough!

Actually, it seems to me that if you were really serious, you'd soak for 6 to 12 hours in a basic solution to leach out oligosaccharides, then ferment with a prepared solution for another 12 to break down phytic acid, and then cook.

I've heard that cooking them in fresh water (throw out the soaking water) helps as well

Yes, you should definitely throw out the water you soaked the beans in. (Even better, change the water halfway through the soaking. The key point is to shift the equilibrium point by making sure that the dissolved oligosaccharides don't redeposit into the beans.)

Pressure cookers are awesome. For example, they'll cook black beans in 15 minutes instead of 2 hours. And they taste amazingly better than canned beans.

The best pressure cookers are from this swiss company, Kuhn Rikon:

http://kuhnrikon.com/products/pressure_cookers/

Super simple to use and safe.

Interesting -- thanks for the tip. Do you have any recipes / other ideas on how to use it, aside from beans?

Incidentally, a while back there was a food thread in which I learned one of my new favorite recipes for dal:

Anyway, my favorite dal recipe is thus (six servings, keeps forever):

1 1/2 c. dried lentils/split peas/etc... 4 c. water 1 1/2 tsp salt 3 tbs butter/oil 1 tsp cumin seeds 1 tsp ground tumeric a small stick of cinnamon (or 1/2 tsp ground cinnamon) 1/4 tsp cayenne pepper 1/4 tsp fresh/ground ginger 1/4 tsp mustard seeds 6 cloves garlic

Cook the lentils. Cook some rice. Heat the butter in the pan and then fry all the spices until the cumin and mustard seeds begin to pop. Pour the spice mixture into the lentils and mix. Possible toppings include: plain yogurt with dill (dried or fresh) diced cucumber, any variety of chutney. I'd add a recipe for chutney, but the cooking and canning process is too long to put here.

Thanks to whoever posted it. I often put carrots and potatoes in with the lentils and mix up the spices some, but variations on the same basic idea work really well.

Grandma's special trick: add a whole potato (peeled, raw) late in the cooking and take it out before it melts into your beans.

It really works quite well, something with absorbing and what not and it might work when you soak the beans first but doing it after it has been cooking also makes the beans thicker :)

This is all done in a crock pot rather than pressure cooker though.

I boil them hard for a few minutes, skim the top foamy shit off, then simmer them really soft after that, and I don't get gassy.

Why on earth would you want beans that don't make you gassy? It's like non-alcoholic beer, there's no fun in it

[Since my BF never comes here, I can say this] It isn't hot when he farts. At all.

So, yeah, I think there are valid reasons for wanting non-gassy beans. :)

By meeting frequently with the constant push of “have you launched?” and then “can I see your chart?”, PG and Harj helped us focus on making the right trade-off to do what it takes to make a great product but not a perfect one.

What chart is he referring to here?

For us, it was our page and user growth charts -- the two main charts to show traction.

I'd offer to cook up some honest-to-goodness Italian pasta (with something like pesto, amatriciana or ragu` alla bolognese) just to be able to hang out at one of those events, if I were ever in the area.

I suspect the main challenge is cooking for 100+ people.

Good point. I guess I could get some help or advice from my brother: he's a chef.

Tangential: there's probably a difference between preparing food for catering vs restaurants. In catering, and presumably at YC dinners, everyone starts each course at the same time (but eats the same food). I'd imagine this to be a different challenge from providing different meals to an equal number of people, but staggered in time, as you would at a restaurant.

In any case, pasta-based meals are probably good candidates for scaling to catering-size dimensions as most of the components aren't overly time-sensitive. I could still see it ending in a disaster if I was doing it for the first time with no professional help.

Does having a startup, or being in YC feel like your cramming for exams, not enough time, too much to do, and no time for a good amount of sleep and proper food?

"At our first meeting with Paul, we showed him a PDF presentation and he sort of freaked out and it was really awkward for about 10 minutes as he tried to digest why we had made a presentation for him."

Why is that? I'm genuinely curious to know what would be uncomfortable about having a presentation, especially at a first meeting. It seems like that would be a good way to say "here's where we're at" in a few quick screens.

Wild-assed guess: it's something people working on projects at BigCo's do in lieu of actual work. It's pantomiming execution instead of executing.

We have a company all-hands this week, flying everyone in from NYC and SF; we're launching a new product and I have to do an hour on it. I don't think I'm going to do a deck. Why bother?

It's something people working on projects at BigCo's do in lieu of actual work. It's pantomiming execution instead of executing.

This is, generally, how I feel about ToDo lists.

How so? Some people need todo lists to keep them focused. Otherwise they forget things that they were supposed to get done, or allow themselves to get distracted by other things.

I use a todo list so I don't forget things. When I'm developing software, the ideas come faster than I can execute them, for one. But the list is only a vim buffer, so it would be hard to waste time micromanaging it like you can with more elaborate todo-list software.

paul is a casual guy and usually likes to have an informal conversation. looking back, the mockups we showed him were really overdeveloped. i think paul was reacting to an idea 5 steps ahead of where it should have been.

I like the blogpost. Is 1000memories.com down? I got pointed to an "Application Error" page when I tried to access it.

Seems to be up now

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