Spilling the Beans on Soup

Prepared Foods, May, 2001 by Laura A. Brandt

Formulators can choose from pre-gelatinized powders for instant soups, precooked powders for simmer soups, and legume flours for soups requiring longer cooking times.

The powders are dried with minimal heat that is just enough to gelatinize the starches, according to Edward Schmidt, president, Fiberich Legume Technologies, a Minnesota-based legume powder supplier.

Hydrated instantized powders flow readily from a can or when pumped.

Pre-gelatinized powders absorb twice as much water as conventionally processed peas, beans and lentils, helping to compensate for the cost of the powders.

Bountiful Beans

Formulators can choose from cranberry beans, navy beans, pintos, kidney bean, Great Northern, green split pea, and other more exotic-sounding beans, such as adzuki, black turtle, cannellini, kunde, Red Chief lentils and yellow peas.

Kunde is an African variety that means "bean" in Swahili. It is a type of cowpea, a relative of the black-eyed pea, which tastes similar but milder than black-eyed peas. These small cream-colored beans are dark red on and around the eye, and are about the same size as mung or adzuki beans.

While Sterner's company recently added kunde to its offerings, African food has not emerged onto the popular food front. "For companies that want to add something different or are looking to revitalize their product lines, they might want to try kunde in soups," says Sterner.

Her company has been working diligently to grow this African bean variety because it believes it will gain popularity. "It takes five years to take a bean from conception to commercialization; part of our job is to look down the road to see what will be of interest in the future," notes Sterner.

Some simmer soup mixes on the market feature many bean varieties. For example, Goya Foods Inc., Secaucus, N.J., markets a 16 Bean Soup Mix and Bean Cuisine Soup from Reily Foods Company, New Orleans, makes a "13 Bean Bouillabaisse."

Muchos Frijoles

While traditional soups--chicken noodle, tomato, split pea, etc.-- are popular in this country, new soup varieties with ethnic overtones are also emerging.

For example, Bean Cuisine from Reily Foods offers several varieties of simmer soup mixes, including Ultima Pasta E Fagioli, Thick As Fog Split Pea, White Bean Provencal and Rocky Mountain Red Bean. The mixes contain separate bean and spice packets "to preserve flavor and freshness."

Black bean, a traditional Hispanic soup, has surfaced in several retail brands. Bean Cuisine's Island Black Bean Soup contains beans, herbs and spices, such as mustard, oregano and cumin. Consumers add their own fresh vegetables and meat.

Goya Foods manufactures a canned Black Bean Soup which contains vinegar, dehydrated onion, bell peppers and garlic. Goya's dried Meal-in-a-Cup version contains similar ingredients and rehydrates in eight minutes after adding boiling water. Fantastic Foods, Petaluma, Calif., offers Jumpin' Black Bean, an instant soup cup containing dehydrated tomatoes, garlic, red and green bell peppers and jalapeno peppers. It rehydrates in five minutes.