Another word of warning

The other evening, I made a chicken chili with red kidney beans. The beans had been soaked all night (8+ hours in a pot on the stove). I then put the rehydrated beans in the crock-pot, thinking they would be cooked thoroughly all day. I was wrong.

I bit into my first bite of the chili for dinner. The beans were hard. I shrugged it off, thinking that perhaps I just had gotten a bad spoonful. By the 3rd spoonful of hard beans, I realized they had not been cooked through. And then I panicked.

I remembered something I had read awhile back about the toxicity of uncooked kidney beans, red in particular. So I googled for the better part of the next half hour to see how bad this would be. Luckily, we're not talking deadly toxic. Just extremely unpleasant toxic. Symptoms of poisoning usually set on fast (between 1 to 3 hours) and are usually gone 3 to 4 hours after that. The most common symptoms are extreme nausea, vomiting, and diarrhea. The kicker? Some sites say as little as 3 ingested uncooked kidney beans can bring on symptoms. And I had definitely had more than that.

Luckily for me, I only had a slight case of nausea, and nothing worse. We now think that the kidney beans may have gotten mildly cooked in our crock pot, killing off some of the bad chemicals, but not all. So my recommendation to you? Don't throw rehydrated beans in a crock pot and assume they will get cooked. It's not a risk you want to take.

Most comprehensive site for red kidney bean poisoning: FoodReference.com