Question
Larry Shearer
I pressure cook my own dry beans. Wondering if you have best practices for creating and storing Aquafaba from dried garbanzo beans?
Answer
So pressure cooking yeah, is, is a, is a great way to handle beans. And, um, uh, likewise, if you want to generate some aqua faba or bean water, uh, which is basically the residual water from cooking beans. And fundamentally, any beans, although garbanzo beans are pretty common because they're, you know, neutral in color and, and flavor and aroma and, um, otherwise pretty popular already, uh, in the space of, um, you know, these plant-based, um, meringue, you know, egg white based meringue, uh, substitutes. And, you know, the, uh, I think the, maybe the one thing that I'll mention here, Larry, is that, uh, when you produce aquafaba on your own, um, and, you know, if you go to, to, uh, whip it up and it just, uh, it's too thin, you know, it just doesn't whip up as, uh, you'd like, or, you know, equivalent to egg whites, you can reduce that water over, you know, some, uh, moderate heat and concentrate, you know, all of those carbohydrates and proteins and things that, uh, contribute to that, that, uh, foamy, uh, effect. Um, and so you can, in other words, you can adjust the consistency of the water to finally achieve, uh, a more stable aquafaba, something, you know, you can't do, of course, with egg whites, but not that you need to do that with egg whites, right? Um, so please give that a try and, um, you know, and then further experiment, uh, you know, as you, as you need to or want to in terms of the initial cooking phase, okay? Of the, the, the beans or the, the chickpeas in this case, uh, in terms of water to, to bean ratio. Um, so you can get closer to your desired concentration of, of, um, you know, aquafaba or bean water in the end from that first round of cooking. Okay? But, uh, really the takeaway here is that that bean water, um, uh, is controllable. It, it's adjustable in consistency.
