Researchers and chefs at the University of Reading aim to encourage British consumers and food producers to switch to bread containing faba beans (commonly known as broad beans), making it healthier and less damaging to the environment.
[...] Five teams of researchers within the University of Reading, along with members of the public, farmers, industry, and policy makers, are now working together to bring about one of the biggest changes to UK food in generations.
[...] This is by increasing pulses in the UK diet, particularly faba beans, due to their favourable growing conditions in the UK and the sustainable nutritional enhancement they provide.
Despite being an excellent alternative to the ubiquitous imported soya bean, used currently in bread as an improver, the great majority of faba beans grown in the UK go to animal feed at present.
[...] "96% of people in the UK eat bread, and 90% of that is white bread, which in most cases contains soya. We've already performed some experiments and found that faba bean flour can directly replace imported soya flour and some of the wheat flour, which is low in nutrients. We can not only grow the faba beans here, but also produce and test the faba bean-rich bread, with improved nutritional quality."
For those who prefer their information in YouTube format
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 07, @02:49PM (3 children)
...And a good chianti.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 07, @04:29PM (2 children)
More like jellied eels washed down with warm beer. Ahhhh Brexit was a success after all!
(Score: 2, Informative) by pTamok on Wednesday March 08, @07:33AM (1 child)
I'll admit that I'm not a fan of jellied eels [wikipedia.org], but elvers fried [suvie.com] in butter are rather good, as is smoked eel.
And warm beer is a misnomer, unless you are talking about mulled ale (the traditional way of making this is to heat up a poker in a fire and plunge it into a pewter mug of ale - it you use a glass, you run the risk of the glass shattering if it touches the poker). English (cask) ale is served at cellar temperature [wikipedia.org] (12 degrees centigrade), which is considerably warmer that the standard setting for a refrigerator (roughly 4 degrees centigrade, for food hygiene reasons). If you are used to drinking beer immediately after it has been removed from a standard refrigerator, or draught keg beer which is flash cooled to well below 12 degrees centigrade, then properly served cask beer at cellar temperature will an unexpected experience.
Serving any beverage at close to the freezing point of water means that flavours are masked/subdued. Similarly, the degree of carbonation affects the flavour and masks a lot, so to many palettes English ale, served a cellar temperature seems both 'warm' and 'flat' - and the reality is that by heavy carbonation and chilling you can worry less about getting the flavours right. Cellar temperature English ale is an acquired taste, much like tea and coffee. Some people never get to appreciate coffee (which means more for me!), but good beer served at a temperature where you can appreciate the subtlety of the flavours, and without overpowering carbonation, truly can be wonderful.
I can appreciate a cold lager beer, but a traditional bitter made with Goldings and Fuggles hops is a wonder. The trouble is, getting ale consistently right is hard, whereas mass-producing a consistent lager is a lot easier. If I had to choose between drinking lager for the rest of my life, or 'warm, flat' English ales, there is no question the ales would be my choice. Sometimes you get a dud, but when they are good, they can be magical.
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Wednesday March 08, @12:10PM
Quite. Americans criticising Brits about beer? I can't stop laughing.
(Score: 2) by inertnet on Tuesday March 07, @03:25PM (1 child)
As can be seen in this video [youtube.com] about a bean.
(Score: 3, Funny) by janrinok on Tuesday March 07, @07:40PM
(Score: 4, Funny) by Opportunist on Tuesday March 07, @03:28PM (8 children)
I mean, it's not like you can in some way make British cuisine any worse.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 07, @03:47PM
Let them eat Moon cheese.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 07, @05:25PM
You mean you've never had boiled toast?
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Tuesday March 07, @06:29PM (1 child)
I was going to say, another revolutionary discovery for the British diet would be a palatable flavor.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 08, @02:56AM
Maybe they are making an effort to address the loss of Nordstream by making their own natural gas?
(Score: 1) by BlueCoffee on Tuesday March 07, @06:41PM (2 children)
Isn't British cuisine mostly meat, potatoes, gravy, lard, and bread? What's not to like?
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Tuesday March 07, @07:35PM
I've heard it said that the British got their reputation for terrible bland food during the war. A big influx of foreign soldiers carrying home the a huge composite "everyman" impression of British cuisine to the rest of the world... As experienced under war rationing, which makes everything taste bad.
(Score: 2) by Opportunist on Tuesday March 07, @09:26PM
I noticed it's mostly vinegar. Probably to eliminate any other taste the food might have.
(Score: 3, Informative) by pTamok on Tuesday March 07, @09:51PM
British cuisine. Hmm.
Try Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's [wikipedia.org] recipes: River Cottage Recipes [rivercottage.net]
Or the Hairy Bikers [wikipedia.org] recipes [hairybikers.com].
As for boiled toast, how about stale bread poached in milk [bbc.co.uk]? (There are lots of variations)
(Score: 3, Touché) by Mojibake Tengu on Tuesday March 07, @04:12PM (8 children)
Just after the bread banned as the CO2 pollutant, the next one waiting for the same fate is... beer. And wine.
The edge of 太玄 cannot be defined, for it is beyond every aspect of design
(Score: 2, Funny) by quietus on Tuesday March 07, @04:48PM (2 children)
You really have a way of making everybody around you depressed, you know.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Mojibake Tengu on Tuesday March 07, @06:35PM
I am realist :D
The edge of 太玄 cannot be defined, for it is beyond every aspect of design
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Tuesday March 07, @08:35PM
Well, we are discussing British cuisine, so it's appropriate.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Tuesday March 07, @07:41PM (4 children)
Biologically sourced CO2 is not a problem - so long as the ecosystem is healthy the ecological carbon cycle just keeps circulating it around.
The problem is in releasing geologically sequestered carbon, which hasn't been part of the ecological carbon cycle for over 300 million years, faster than the ecological carbon cycle can sequester it. Which causes CO2 to build up in the oceans, where it acidifies them, and in the atmosphere, where it causes global warming.
(Score: 3, Touché) by Mojibake Tengu on Tuesday March 07, @08:12PM (1 child)
Is that so? You should tell this to Global Warming Alarmists fellows about... cows!
I am not exactly a farming specialist, but I guess the methane farting cattle were not previously geologically sequestered too...
The edge of 太玄 cannot be defined, for it is beyond every aspect of design
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 08, @02:59AM
Beans, beans. The musical fruit.
Now we can ban Brits like we do cows!
(Score: 4, Interesting) by deimtee on Tuesday March 07, @09:31PM (1 child)
We are currently releasing carbon faster than it is sequestered, but it does get sequestered, mostly by shellfish creating limestone. If it wasn't for natural carbon releases like volcanoes and oil seeps then the entire biosphere would die in less than 10,000 years due to lack of carbon. 10.000 years is the blink of an eye in geological time.
No problem is insoluble, but at Ksp = 2.943×10−25 Mercury Sulphide comes close.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Reziac on Monday March 20, @02:25AM
I've heard estimates from as distant as 1.2M years, to a very alarming 150 years (the latter -- from a PhD in climate science -- pointed out that the decline would be accelerated by increasing scarcity).
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by Snospar on Tuesday March 07, @04:18PM (2 children)
Where do they get their facts from, the first Google result doesn't agree with their figures:
Bread remains one of the UK's favourite foods, with 99% of households buying bread – or the equivalent of nearly 12 million loaves are sold each day.
Each year 99 bread products are purchased per household. ...
White bread accounts for 76% of the bread sold in the UK.
I'm still surprised at how high the percentage of White bread is but 90% seemed well out.
(Score: 2) by theluggage on Tuesday March 07, @06:27PM (1 child)
It all depends where you look. In the time it takes to choose between the 3 varieties of artesinal organic ancient grains sourdough roll available from the counter at Waitrose, Lidl sold 50 sliced white "Mothers Joy" toastie loaves and the local fast food outlets together served enough white baps to fill a Volkswagen camper.
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Wednesday March 08, @12:13PM
Not counting the time taken to organise a new mortgage to pay for the Waitrose loaves.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by tangomargarine on Tuesday March 07, @05:02PM (6 children)
What? Wheat or whatever they're using to make bread is harder on the soil than growing beans, or something?
In other news, anything that breathes is damaging to the environment because CO2 Am Bad. So stop breathing, you jerk.
It sounds like adding these beans makes the bread healthier, so focus on that instead of this omnipresent hand-wringing about every damn thing harming the environment somehow. (Cf. how if you research hard enough every single thing you can eat is bad for you in one way or another.)
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 5, Informative) by theluggage on Tuesday March 07, @06:16PM (5 children)
Yes. High-school science: growing legumes like beans fixes nitrogen in the soil and alternating them with other crops potentially reduces the need for artificial fertilisers. Agriculture worked that out in the 18th century before it worked out that they could just grow the same crop year after year by dumping a fuckton of artificial fertiliser on it and sod the consequences. I don't know if TFA is seriously proposing this as an advantage, but it's at least superficially plausible.
No, folks (on both sides of the climate "debate", unfortunately), breathing and brewing beer should not damage the environment because the CO2 you're releasing was already floating around in the air a short while ago before it got captured by a plant. The problem is us digging up every last scrap of fossilised carbon we can find, that has been safely locked away since umpteen million years ago when the environment was very different, and releasing it back into the atmosphere in the space of a century or so. Cows farting wouldn't be a problem. either if we stopped ripping up carbon-eating trees and replacing them with more farting cows.
If you actually read the words in TFA though, one of the main advantages they are claiming is using these instead of the imported soya beans (i.e. carried for thousands of miles on cargo ships burning the oil sludge that's too dirty to burn on land) that they are already using in bread.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 07, @06:46PM (1 child)
If a cow farts in a carbon-eating tree forest, does it still make a sound?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 07, @08:30PM
Not but it still rips a new asshole in the ozone layer.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Wednesday March 08, @03:11AM (2 children)
The actual crime is putting beans in bread, soy or otherwise.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by theluggage on Wednesday March 08, @02:08PM (1 child)
I think we're talking about "bread" of the "budget supermarket own-brand bargain family-pack 48 economy white hotdog rolls" variety here, in which case I'd be far less worried about nutritious beans in the bread than about the mechanically recovered pink slime that was typically served with it. Still, love it or hate it, cheap white bread is a significant part of the nation's diet.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Wednesday March 08, @03:43PM
Probably. I don't consider such abominations to be either bread or meat. If I'm going to suffer such nastiness, I'll just eat the dog food directly.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Tuesday March 07, @05:14PM (6 children)
Weight Watchers scores food according to how healthy it is. More points = more fattening and unhealthy. I am astonished at how very many points they assign bread. Though we've all heard for years now that traditional white bread is startlingly unhealthy, I'm still used to thinking of bread as a baseline. Your daily bread.
From what I gather, the attempts to make bread better by promoting whole wheat rather than white haven't done much. It's a little healthier, that's all.
(Score: 3, Informative) by BlueCoffee on Tuesday March 07, @07:00PM (5 children)
Bread isn't inherently bad for you, but it is deceptively high in calories, just like any other food made from grains such as pasta, crackers, tortilla chips, etc, so that's why WW would give it higher points. A handful of spaghetti the size of a quarter is 300 calories, and most people eat 2-3x that amount in one meal so just one plate of naked spaghetti can approach 1000 cals. Like most foods, it's bad when we eat too much of it, too much of the time.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 07, @08:35PM (1 child)
If you're gonna eat pasta, make it the day before and reheat it. It converts the carbs into "resistant starch" which behaves more like fiber in your digestive tract.
https://www.diabetes.org.uk/guide-to-diabetes/enjoy-food/carbohydrates-and-diabetes/carbs-and-cooking [diabetes.org.uk]
(Score: 1) by BeaverCleaver on Wednesday March 08, @09:39AM
There's also "pulse pasta" made from beans and/or lentils, and chickpea pasta. All have considerably more protein and dietary fibre than wheat pasta. In my opinion, they taste better too. Even if you disagree, it would be very difficult to tell unless you are eating the pasta plain, and not covered in some kind of sauce.
(Score: 2) by ChrisMaple on Wednesday March 08, @04:31AM (1 child)
Spaghetti swells a bit when boiled. 300 calories worth is a LOT of spaghetti.
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Wednesday March 08, @07:16AM
Agreed. The usual portion of (dry) pasta in this area is around 80-100 gr per person. Anyone who is really huge might get 120. When mixed with a sauce it is considered a substantial meal for the average person.
But if in your area people tend to eat much larger portions than this regularly, then look around at the rest of the population. Are they overweight? You might have just worked out the reason for it.
(Score: 1) by pTamok on Wednesday March 08, @07:36AM
Commercially produced bread can often be rather salty as well.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by sonamchauhan on Wednesday March 08, @05:54AM (5 children)
...hope it's not the flour of raw beans...
"However, a number of antinutritional factors such as phytic acid, trypsin inhibitors, saponins, vicin and convicine (favism-inducing compounds), lectins, and condensed tannins negatively affect the biological value of faba beans resulting in its underutilization. For expanding the utilization of faba beans in human nutrition, the removal of these antinutrients is necessary. A number of methods including dehulling, soaking, germination, fermentation, and heat processing (cooking, boiling, extrusion, and autocalving) have been used individually or in combination to eliminate or destroy the antinutritional factors in faba beans.
(Score: 3, Informative) by sonamchauhan on Wednesday March 08, @05:56AM (4 children)
Source: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/leg3.129 [wiley.com]
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Wednesday March 08, @07:22AM (3 children)
I don't think many people around here eat their faba beans if they are still hard or raw. Your quote is correct but it highlights both the problem and the solution.
(Score: 2) by sonamchauhan on Saturday March 11, @01:11PM (2 children)
We're talking Faba bean **flour** here. It's the rare flour manufacturer (but they do exist) that takes the trouble to 'activate' or germinate the raw beans/grains before milling the flour. Typically, they just dehusk and mill them
For instance, this one makes no mention of germination:
https://vestkorn.com/vestkorn-faba-bean-flour/ [vestkorn.com]
The fababeans are thoroughly cleaned to remove all foreign materials and reassure that no wheat and soybeans are present. Then the fababeans are dehulled and the kernels and hulls are accurately separated to get a pure kernel ready for milling. After milling to the desired particle size, we get a lightgrey flour with a mild beany taste. Vestkorn faba bean flour has around 30% protein and 48% carbohydrates, making it to an excellent source of protein.
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Saturday March 11, @01:23PM (1 child)
Thank you but I wasn't arguing that particular point. Whenever I have used flour it has been cooked - I cannot think of anywhere where flour is used and consumed in its raw state in any significant quantity. If, as the Wiki page claims, the harmful part of the faba bean can be countered simply by cooking then flour should also be rendered safe by cooking.
(Score: 2) by sonamchauhan on Saturday March 11, @11:44PM
You make a good point that flour is mostly cooked.
But cooking does not destroys all anti-nutrients. The Faba bean Wikipedia page [wikipedia.org] states: "Most of the relatively low toxin concentrations found in V. faba can be destroyed by boiling the beans for 10 minutes" -- I think this is what you are referring to. But the sentence is referring to just one 'plant-poison' in the faba bean: phytohaemagglutinin. There are others (I'm guessing dozens). To reduce those further, you need soaking and possibly germination. An example is this reference from the Wikipedia page:
Also, cooking techniques vary. For example, there's low-temperature (below 100 C) extrusion of flour into cereal. There's the restaurant cook stirring in some flour right at the end to thicken soup a bit more. And there are all the different baking techniques -- searing a tortilla, making pastry, baking bread -- not all would have the same effect in deactivating plant-poisons.
If I have a choice, I'm steering clear of products that state 'faba bean flour' as an ingredient, but don't specify how it was processed.
On a similar note, I highly recommend steering clear of all food using corn products (cornflour, corn kernels, tortillas, corn chips) unless you know its been processed by a technique known as Nixtamalization: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nixtamalization [wikipedia.org]
This is what ancient South Americans used to do and is essential to remove the key 'plant poisons' in corn.