fried and dried post 1 of 2 today

FRIED AND DRIED

note: post 1 of 2 today
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For whatever reason as I never know what is going to activate my “on a mission from God” ( Blues Brothers reference ) mode, I took it into my head that I needed to get into making tofu.  I think it was in a past article or comment mentioning that it would be nice if I could substitute or at least subsidize meat while living off grid.  If you didn’t have to pressure can, and didn’t need a fridge ( just cold cellar dairy ), life would be much easier.  You go into town every weekend, or even stretching it out to two weeks ( if you didn’t need to fetch water and you had enough clean cloths until laundry day ), avoiding the worst weather and wear and tear on the bike.  Well, I knew that you have to be careful eating beans because if they aren’t cooked your body can’t assimilate the nutrients, and in fact will actually LOSE some.  The only thing you end up with is calories.  And I already knew that soy has always been problematic in that they have the same issue as other beans but they take on the added issue of delivering or causing the formation of pseudo-estrogen. 

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I never wanted Bitch Tits ( guy boobies-you can get those from taking steroids to bulk up ) before and now I certainly don’t need my sex drive to diminish any more.  A little is good, as I like being able to think with the big brain and overrule the little brain.  That little humper has been in charge since my mid teens until around age fifty, and it was nice to see him kicked off the board of directors-now merely in a consulting role.  The thing is, if I get even less hormones I worry that the bastard will revolt and refuse to work at all.  At least now he’s still game most of the time ( we just went from a sprint to a marathon ).  So, no estrogen for me in my food, thank you very much.  I had read about the dangers of soy decades ago but decided that I needed a refresher.  I know, you know, and Ross Perot knows that everyone lies.  Those vegetarian folks pushing soy, the industry selling soy, and the publishers of articles and books warning you about soy, they all lie.  Okay, they don’t REALLY lie.  They pick and choose through the data to feed their conformational bias.  It isn’t willful untruth, just another unfortunate programming defect in our monkey men species.  We believe we aren’t lying when we lie and then lie to ourselves about lying so no one thinks we are liars.

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Of course what this means is that we have to make up our own minds about all the benefits and dangers of everything.  No one is going to admit being wrong about something so you can never wait for them to admit they humped it up.  Just keep an open mind in case you were wrong yourself.  I’ve always been partial to junk food, as is anyone because it is basically chemically altered corn that assumes whatever form your deepest desires take.  But at an early age my mom was a health food guru and past a very young age when I was allowed sugar cereal ( and I’m talking young, like four years old ) and other staples of normalcy, or at least normal for the children of the Manufactured Miracle Foods era, my parents, I was raised on healthy food ( I especially remember the adventures that was driving to other cities trying to find the one odd bakery that actually sold whole wheat bread, and this in California home of granola freaks-this prior to her making all her own ). 

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So, I was never a completely dedicated fan of either diametrically opposed food groups, rather of both, and I think it has given me a slight advantage in judging the accuracy of their claims ( well, that, a lot of reading and a lot of self experimentation ).  Which, unfortunately, both run to evangelical heights of absurdity.  The advocates of soy treat it like any other bean, and the detractors list nearly every medical ailment known to man as side effects.  But having encountered both types before, repeatedly, I kind of know what to watch for.  The advocates don’t admit to anything and the detractors claim all evil and wrong doing.  You know the vegetarians don’t know crap, since they don’t even know about the cooking issue ( they think raw ground soy as filling is acceptable ), and you know the scare mongers are snake oil salesmen ( selling the product, selling fear of the product-same difference ) and don’t know crap ( if a medical doctor is telling you this, is he an advocate of traditional practices such as chemotherapy? ).  Since the pros don’t know of any danger, add some.  And since the cons are overly excitable, take with a grain of salt.

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And the verdict is in.  We don’t meet in the middle.  Middle ground is a compromise and with your health should you really be doing that?  Hell to the No, yo!  I could find no research that convinced me to think soy was anything other than poison on a stick ( the only way to safely eat it was Miso, a six month long fermentation process that needs an exotic store bought mold.  Really?  All that trouble for a bean.  If it was steak, okay ).  Look, I know sugar is terrible for you.  I consume it is much smaller doses than I used to ( I’m surprised I didn’t blow out an internal organ, the amount of coffee and soda I consumed as I weaned myself off of alcohol ).  I don’t think a little is extremely bad for you.  I don’t think my one cigarette a day is going to kill me ( how much car exhaust do you suck in? ).  I know moderation.  But soy, it just seems like a terrible food I should not use in moderation.  And I know that could be a too arbitrary of a decision, but sometimes the intellect can decide and sometimes you just need to trust your gut. 

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So soy is out which means tofu is a No-Go.  Which was sad.  Not that I like tofu as even the extra firm is a bit too nasty in the texture department for me.  But I sure liked soy jerky when I tried it ( all these were store bought.  They might taste much better homemade, but somehow I doubt it.  Factory food is engineered to taste better than homemade, or at least the expensive stuff is-you need to discount those manufactures who have recently gone all full retard on certain items, dropping the quality to near zero ).  My brainstorm was that I’d take tofu and run it in my food dryer, getting the moisture down.  Well, since tofu was soy and soy was out, I needed other answers.  I Googled “non-soy tofu” and got a bunch of Indian ( dot, not feather ) recipes, usually using garbanzos.  Which suck, from my experience with salads.  But those of course were canned and perhaps fresh was better.  But the video was saying as how you don’t get a milk out of that bean like you do soy anyway, so why go with a bean I don’t know much about?  They were saying just soak overnight and then blend into a slurry.  Then set up and cut into cubes.

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Well, I have this neat little device called a grain grinder, so piss on that soaking nonsense.  The grinder is the only way to process beans that have gotten too old to soak, anyway ( a pressure cooker might work, I’m not sure ).  So I’m just assuming the grinder is best all around.  I tried grinding on fine, but it seems best to grind just like you would the wheat, three times grinding from course to medium to fine.  Once you have your Victorian grinder ( which you order through my Amazon ad to give me a commission because you love me as no other non-fiction writer ) set up, looking at it with the hopper and handle towards you, you grind at 3 o’clock, then noon, then 9 o’clock ( 7 o’clock is closed completely-don’t use that setting as you’ll grind metal ).  I went with lentils, a more expensive option than pinto ( in our area of 25% Mexican population, pintos are the dominant used bean and hence the cheapest from quantity ).  I do fine with pinto as I like refried beans, but from some nasty soup/stew nasty concoction experiences I don’t like lentils.  My thought process was that if I could get those turds to taste good I could get any bean to work.

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Now you just cook the bean flour.  Remember about the seeds being designed to go through the gut of the bird and sprout from its droppings?  A bean will go right through you without absorbing nutrients if it isn’t cooked properly.  Just like a potato.  What you do is treat it like a pot of old fashion oatmeal.  Add water and let cook for awhile.  I had two cups of bean flour, so I doubled that in liquid.  The day before I tried half and half and it didn’t seem to cook very well.  By using three and half cups water and a half cup soy sauce, I got enough liquid in there to keep the paste bubbling.  I added a quarter cup sugar as I wanted a teriyaki flavor.  I was just kind of spitballing here, trying different things.  Once I realized I wasn’t making tofu as much as mush, it was a lot easier to figure this out.  Remember corn meal mush?  You take cornmeal, add water and cook for awhile, then put the mush into a pan and refrigerate over night, cutting into slices and frying.  Very tasty stuff.  Once I started treating the bean flour like the corn version ( polenta, in Italy ), it all fell into place.

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I placed the pan of two to one water to bean flour on medium and let cook for fifteen minutes, stirring occasionally ( I need to do a bit more research on how long it takes to cook beans, but this seemed reasonable ).  By this time the mush was nice and thick, and I glopped it onto a greased cookie sheet and put in the fridge.  You are going to have a really messy pan.  The bean paste cooks onto the bottom and is a bear to clean.  You’ll need to soak and scrape twice or so.  Make a big batch, so as to lesson the times you need to clean.  After an hour the mush is nice and firm, ready to be cut.  I made it about small French fry size.  I put most of them on the food dryer and some I tried frying up.  Oh.  My.  God.  That fried mush might not have been a perfect meat substitute but it was tasty as tasty could be.  It tasted nothing like bean paste ( I had tried some the day before in my first experimental batch, unseasoned.  It tasted exactly like what it was, mushy lentils.  Yuck! ) and very close to what the makers of tofu fake meat wished their slop tasted like.  Even the dog was impressed, but it is kind of hard to tell with her.  She is picky, but inconsistent.  I will say, as yummy as polenta is, the bean version is twice as good.

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I tried the dried version after four hours and while good enough the middle was too raw.  After seven hours I had a better product, cooked all the way through but not so hard it was like burnt toast.  It almost tasted like jerky.  Of course, after sitting all night it went from chewy to crusty on the outside and chewy in the middle, so I don’t know if you could really say it is a proper jerky substitute in texture.  I’ll try to experiment on the next batch, only drying for four hours and letting it sit overnight to firm up.  Perhaps that will leave it staying chewy.  Of course I’ll update you the results.  I’m also going to try pinto instead of lentil beans.  I’m pretty excited about the results, even at this early stage.  Perhaps the soy sauce and the sugar take away some of the healthy aspects of this, as well as adding to the cost, but I think all things considered this is a relatively affordable and relatively healthy protein snack to replace what might be junk food binging when you are hungry between meals ( which I usually am, from late morning to early afternoon ).
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[ update.  Pinto beans are half the price and make less of a mess, but not only do they take a lot to grind-open the plates way out, grind about four times-they taste like utter crap using the above methods.  Also, just one pound of beans fills a 10x15 cookie sheet high ]

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