LINCOLN SQUARE — Fear not, gentle readers, this column about beans isn't about to devolve into a dissertation on flatulence.
I'm talking instead about beans' other magical power — the one where they, presto-chango, turn from purple to green.
To be clear from the get-go, when I say "bean," I'm referring to Phaseolus vulgaris, more commonly known as the string bean/French bean/garden bean/snap bean and who knows how many other aliases. Garden beans differ from, say kidney beans, in that they're eaten, pod and all, while still technically "unripe," whereas other beans are harvested once they're old and dried up.
Patty Wetli recounts her disappointment and wonder surrounding color changing beans on the latest edition of the "Garden in the City" podcast:
Though native to the Americas, garden beans have long since been domesticated and gone global in their reach, with China by far the top producer.
Doing my part to boost the U.S. tally, I planted two varieties of bush beans in my garden, as opposed to pole beans, because I knew I was also planning on growing tomatoes and there's only so much staking I'm willing to do. As if I were scrolling through potential matches on some online dating site, I chose Royalty Purple Pod and Pencil Pod Golden Wax beans based solely on looks. I thought the pictures on their seed packets were pretty.
Only upon further acquaintance did I learn of their particular quirks.
Because beans have a habit of ripening quickly — yesterday's infant is tomorrow's full-grown adult — I've been harvesting my crop nearly daily, and subsequently wondering, nearly daily, what to do with the things.
A casserole, beans' raison d'être in the Midwest, didn't feel seasonally appropriate. I came across an interesting recipe for potato salad with beans, but then temperatures suddenly spiked all July-like and I wasn't in the mood to boil spuds on a hot stove. Scratch that, I'm never in the mood to boil spuds.
So I settled on a quick steaming, and here's where things got interesting.
I put a couple handfuls of purple and yellow beans (yellow being the very definition of a wax bean) into a pot of simmering water and covered with a lid. When I lifted the top moments later, the yellow beans were still there, but the purple had disappeared, replaced, abracadabra, by green-colored beans.
Whither the purple pods?
With apologies to Sherlock Holmes, anyone equipped with an Internet connection can play mystery detective these days.
My puzzle was particularly easy to solve via Google search, and the answer has nothing to do with magic, and everything to do with chemistry.
My new BFF over at the Garden Betty blog offered the best layman's explanation: Purple beans get their coloring from pigments called anthocyanins. Heat — via baking, sauteing or boiling — breaks down the pigments, leaving behind green chlorophyll, which was there all along.
I don't know why, but this bummed me out.
According to an article published in the Christian Science Monitor, the purple coloring doesn't add anything to the bean's flavor. But even if my taste buds can't tell the difference, my eyes can. I appreciate how illogical this sounds, but I wanted to eat purple beans — if I'd wanted green, I'd have grown green.
To preserve the color, CSM suggested minimizing the amount of time the beans are exposed to heat, soaking them first in vinegar or lemon juice, or just eating them raw. Speaking as someone who's not a fan of cooking, that third option sounded like a winner.
I will have plenty of opportunity to crunch my way through pods this year, as I've managed to increase production by actually paying attention to lessons learned last year.
The top takeaway from my initial go-round with beans: bigger does not mean better.
Last year, I let my beans mature to the point of bursting their pods. This year, my mantra is "pick early and often."
Frequent harvesting, the experts will tell you, is the surest way to prolonged production.
According to the sages at the Weekend Gardener Web magazine: "You should pick your beans before their pods swell and fill up with seeds. When the seeds finish forming inside the pods, it sends a signal to the plant to stop growing, which is something you don't want, so keep those beans picked."
The beans will not necessarily make this easy, preferring to turn harvest time into a game of hide and seek.
Beans, I'm convinced, will do anything to stay attached to their vine, sidling up to the plant's similarly hued stem, cloaking themselves in leaves, or, in the case of Purple Royalty, blending in with the color of the soil.
Now you see 'em, now you don't. Perhaps there's magic in beans after all.
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