Home Cooking · Samin Nosrat & Hrishikesh Hirway

Bean There, Done That (with Josh Malina)

March 27, 2020·59 min·5 clips

Samin reveals why soaking beans creates a more evenly cooked result, with exceptions for fresh harvests.

1. Home Cooking is a pandemic-era podcast hosted by food writer Samin Nosrat and Rishi Dhingra, who take listener questions about cooking with what's on hand. 2. Samin Nosrat is the author of Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat and a professional cook; Rishi Dhingra is the creator and host of Song Exploder, described as someone who 'cuts himself entirely out of the interviews' with musicians. 3. The episode's central premise is that quarantine—despite its constraints—offers home cooks the one thing they usually lack: time. 4. Samin opens by describing a spontaneous improvised meal of scrambled eggs over melted Havarti on toast, topped with chili crisp and fresh basil from a Trader Joe's windowsill plant, served with boiled asparagus. 5. She characterizes the result as simultaneously tasting like 'pizza and scrambled eggs and Chinese food' and frames it as an example of using cooking to pamper yourself during an anxious period. 6. Rishi describes his own pandemic adjustment: eating savory oats in the morning with vegetable stock, Beyond Meat crumbles, and seaweed furikake to cut down on sweet breakfasts as a diabetes risk management strategy. 7. Listener Lily asks the first bean question—to soak or not to soak—and Samin declares herself firmly in the soaking camp, recommending Rancho Gordo for fresh-harvest heirloom beans. 8. Samin explains that bean age is the key variable: old beans (identifiable by outdated packaging logos at discount stores) need soaking and will still cook unevenly; fresh beans may not need soaking at all. 9. Listener Jim's question about three-year-old Spanish Fuentes Soco garbanzos leads Samin to explain that dried beans are biologically seeds—designed to be preserved—and 'don't go bad' but may take longer to soften. 10. Samin's three-sentence bean recipe: soaked beans in the same liquid, salt and bay leaf, simmer until five randomly sampled beans are all creamy inside. 11. The fart-versus-flavor debate—whether to discard bean soaking liquid before cooking—is resolved humorously: 'you can keep the farts and the flavor, or you can get rid of the farts and the flavor.' 12. Samin explains that bean cooking liquid becomes starchy and unctuous as beans break down and calls it 'more valuable than gold,' recommending it as a base for warm salad vinaigrettes, ribollita, or breakfast with a poached egg. 13. Rishi's father calls into the show live to clarify whether Rishi's mother ever made dal with green split peas—she had not, but had once used yellow split peas. 14. A listener asks for non-curry lentil uses, and Samin offers adas polo (Iranian lentil rice with fried raisins), a French warm lentil salad with sherry vinaigrette and bacon, and a torn-bread salad with macerating red onion. 15. Rishi adds a no-cook Trader Joe's hack: refrigerated black lentils mixed with jarred bruschetta sauce makes a chip dip that requires no preparation. 16. The frozen vegetable segment is triggered by three consecutive questions about which frozen vegetables work best; Samin advocates for English peas blended into a silky tahini-pea soup, and Rishi names Trader Joe's organic frozen sweet corn as his 'ride or die.' 17. Samin explains the technique for freezing fresh vegetables at home: blanch, drain thoroughly, freeze in a single layer on parchment-lined sheet pans until solid, then transfer to freezer bags. 18. The episode's most personal segment comes from listener Shana in Philadelphia, whose extended family is in Iran during the pandemic as Persian New Year begins; Samin describes the Nowruz tradition of the Hafsin table and says sabzi polo (herbed rice) is her most comforting food. 19. Listeners who enjoy practical cooking instruction delivered in a warm, conversational tone with a mix of food science and personal storytelling will find this episode consistently engaging. 20. Listeners looking for a structured recipe show or step-by-step video-style cooking instruction will find the unscripted format loose and tangential.

As heard by us

A warm, useful listen about turning toast, eggs, freezer vegetables, and soaked beans into dinner.

Bean There, Done That sits in the useful space between planning dinner and making something decent from what is already around. Samin Nosrat and Rishi K.

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Why you'd press play

You want dinner advice that starts with toast and ends with beans.

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