Abstract:
Cooking quality of common beans greatly influences acceptability. The objective
of this study was to quantify the effect of bean type, storage time, temperature
and relative humidity (RH) on the cooking time of four bean types grown in
Kenya. Beans were stored under different temperature (25, 35 and 45C) and RH
(75 and 83%). After sampling, they were pre-soaked or not and cooked to generate
cooking curves which were subjected to nonlinear regression. Significance of
the different variables was evaluated using mixed model regression. Higher storage
temperatures (35 and 45C), higher RH (83%) and extended time significantly
increased lag phase and cooking time. Soaking pretreatments reduced cooking
time. Canadian wonder and Pinto beans took long thus hard-to-cook while Rose
coco and Red haricot took short cooking time, thus, easy-to-cook. This work
demonstrated the critical nature of bean type, storage and pretreatment conditions
in influencing bean cooking quality.
