I'm pretty convinced by this argument. In general I find that fresher produce is significantly better when you can get it. In NYC it's hard to come by except for at food co-ops and farmers markets. I've also bought very freshly-milled flour last year during the Great Sourdough Obsession and it was significantly more flavourful and better behaved. I wonder if the real issue with cooking beans is simply one of freshness but other than the Rancho Gordo claims I have yet to see other mention of this.
It wouldn’t be surprising at all if it has similar benefits for other hard to digest sugar sources like beans
I would add a 1/4 teaspoon of baking soda to the water. I don't reuse my soak water, and I don't salt my water until after they have cooked. I may experiment with adding salt beforehand later, but I suspect that I'll need to add salt to the soak water too for this method.
Adding garlic and bay leafs are nice, but not necessary, as is an onion. For red beans I often blacken an onion on the stove and then throw it in whole in the pot with the beans.
As for flavor, I can't recall having more flavor coming from not soaking the beans. In fact I get more umami richness from a long soak.
>Gray and his colleagues developed a method for extracting most of the alpha-galactosides from beans. The beans are boiled for three minutes (effectively killing the bean and allowing the sugars to pass through the cell walls), then allowed to stand for two hours. That water is poured off and the beans are covered and soaked for another two hours. Then they’re drained, covered and soaked another two hours before being drained and rinsed a final time.
>This method succeeded in ridding the beans of 90% of the troublesome sugars, but as you might expect, there was a side effect. “I used to do this blanch-soak method all the time at home and it works very nicely,” Gray says. “The one thing people who ate dinner with us have noted is that you do lose some flavor.”
>What’s more -- without going into details of what they measured and how -- suffice it to say that even with almost all of the alpha-galactosides gone, there wasn’t a consistent marked decrease in human flatulence.
>“We reduced the alpha-galactoside content by 90% but we haven’t done anything to dietary fiber,” says Gray, “and dietary fiber produces similar effects.”
https://www.latimes.com/food/dailydish/la-dd-dont-soak-dried...
I have found that if I let the soak go too long that a good deal of lactic acid builds up in the beans which causes them to take longer to cook. Rinsing well and then adding a 1/4 teaspoon of baking soda seems to neutralize the added acidity. The beans are smooth inside and have a distinctly greater umami flavor, likely due to some protein breakdown into amino acids.
Fun stuff.