Kitchen Secrets

There is an old habit in Japanese cooking that heirloom bean lovers everywhere should borrow: dropping a strip of kombu into the pot before the beans ever hit a simmer. It sounds like a small addition, barely worth mentioning, but the effects on digestion, nutrition, and flavor are real enough that plenty of cooks now…

There’s nothing quite like a big pot of heirloom beans. And while you can reinvent them several ways, a proper pot of beans sometimes makes more than most would want to eat in a week. The good news is that cooked heirloom beans freeze beautifully, and if you do it right, you’ll barely notice a…