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1. Costing
beanpriceozcups
Conchita great northern1.41 12 2.75
Pubilx chickpeas 2.19 16 2.5
Iberia pintos 1.39 12 1.75
Diana black 1.33 12 3
2x Diana lentils 1.37 12 3
Total: 9.06 76 16

2. Cleaning:
Sort by hand, or spread in a single layer in a flat bottom vessel to find and remove any sticks/stones. Cover with water - any insects will float. (In 16 cups of dry beans I didn't find any visible surprises, and we'll rinse the dry beans prior to soaking in step 4.)

3. Portioning:
Divided and mixed cleaned dry beans into 4 baggies of approx. 1/2 cup lentils and 1/4 cup of each other type of bean, i.e. 2.5 cups dry per baggie, and a 5th baggie of approximately double measures. Due to uneven package volumes and imprecise dry measures, I ended up with an extra cup of lentils which I redistributed among baggies. So now my 4 "base" baggies were ~2.8 cups dry each.

4. Soaking:
For future reference, lentils don't need to be soaked. Soaking black beans with lighter beans will leave them all stained black bean black. Beans absorb a lot of water during soaking, as much as 2-3 times their original volume. There are several methods of soaking that take various lengths of time.

"Quick" soak: Rinse dry beans once in cold water, drain, place in fresh water. Because I'm constrained to cooking on an electric hot plate that barely reaches boiling, I added a little salt to lower the boiling point. Bring to a boil, boil uncovered 2 minutes, cover and let stand 1 hour. Drain and store or proceed to cook.

By this point my original 2.8 cups of beans had expanded to 6 cups, filling my cookpot about halfway.

5. Cooking:
Cover soaked beans with a couple inches of water and bring to a boil. Lower heat, cover, and simmer 1.5 to 2 hours until tender. On my hot plate with the post-drain re-add of salt to lower boiling point, "cover and simmer" occurs a bit to the "low" side between "low" and "medium". For future reference, 6 cups water to cover 6 cups soaked beans is excessive in this mix. I think 4 cups would have been plenty sufficient.


Conclusions
16 cups of dry beans, at 1 serving per 1/4 cup, is a hefty 64 servings. Each serving averages 8g of protein and 50%DV fiber; assuming 2 servings at a sitting, $10 makes a month's worth of daily beans. Aside from protein and fiber though, beans are pretty nutritionally devoid. I'm curious if some local hippie store offers bulk organic beans with a preferable nutrition profile.

I could use a tray to rest my hot plate on, because even though it barely boils pure water, the addition of salt, soup mix, beans etc. inevitably results in a covered pot boiling over.

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Tune in next time when we explore the question, "wtf do I do with this much beans so that I don't get totally freaking sick of them?"


References:
dry bean package labels
Cooking dry beans from scratch at CookingManager.com