Crunchy Chili Beans

After both Buck and I had our gastric bypass surgery, we ate a lot of chili. One cup was a meal and left us feeling satisfied for a long time. I made a big batch of chili in the slow cooker about every week to ten days and we ate it one to two times a day.

That all changed when I managed to get hold of the crunchy chili beans. I was buying my pinto beans at Costco--25 pound bags at a time--then filling every empty food storage container I could find. I tried to keep two bags ahead, part of that food storage thing. However, one bag I bought was full of beans that would not soften when cooked. Even after twelve hours of cooking, when everything else that made up the chili was cooked to death, the beans were chewy.

Buck does not like the crunchy beans. He kept telling me to cook them longer. It made no difference. Then he  insisted that they were too old and I need to throw them out. I was tempted to do that until I made a batch of chili with beans I found hidden far back in my cabinet that were marked as having been purchased months earlier than the crunchy beans. Those beans cooked up nice and soft in no time at all.

I made chili a month ago and the beans were crunchy. Dang! Thought I already used up all those crunchy beans! After the first night, Buck wouldn't touch the chili. I ended up eating the rest of the batch by myself.

Monday I pulled out beans to soak, thinking Hooray! now all the old beans are gone for sure because I used the last of them a month ago. Buck looked at the beans and announced that they were awful dark. Must be too old. He wanted me to throw them out. I retrieved another container of beans. They were less dark and were dated for three months earlier. The more I thought about it, the "too old" theory did not add up for me. I insisted that the beans were not crunchy because they were too old but because we got a bad batch of beans. Maybe they were harvested too soon or something.

Besides, I was pretty sure I already used up the last of the crunchy beans. Then again, maybe this last jug of crunchy beans escaped my notice last month and had since jumped to the front of my cupboard. To appease Buck, I put the less dark but older beans on to soak.

Buck didn't like the idea of using the older beans. He was sure I was soaking more crunchy beans. He proposed a contest. He suggested I take two cups from the darker beans that are dated more recently and put them on to soak, too, and cook up two batches of chili at the same time.

Throughout the day, the beans from the newer, darker in color batch, the ones I suspected just might be the last holdouts from the crunchy beans, soaked up to double their size. The other beans, not so much. Buck was sure the ones that swelled up the most were non-crunchy beans. I suspected just the opposite. I wanted the opposite to be true because I found about 10-12 pounds of those beans tucked away in the back of another cupboard.

Yesterday I cooked both batches of beans into chili. The older beans, the ones I still have lots of, cooked up nice and soft within 5-6 hours. The newer, darker beans I cooked and cooked and cooked ad nauseum.  

The good news is, the bulk of the beans I have left cook up to be soft. The bad news is, I won the contest by demonstrating that it was not because the beans were too old; they were just destined to be CRUNCHY!!! --the bad news part being that I have a choice of throwing out that batch of chili or, once again, eating it all by myself.

Yes, I kept the crunchy chili separate from the chili with the soft beans, and yes, I will end up eating the crunchy chili all by myself because I am too cheap to toss something that, other than being a little chewy, is perfectly good food. However, I think the rest of the beans that cook up crunchy are going to go into homemade heating pads for my back and neck.