Dry Pinto's with Dehydrated Vegetables Recipe Ideas

Pintos--depends on how old they get and whether you have a pressure cooker for them or not. My best advice, if you have a dehydrator, would be to cook them all until they're just soft, dehydrate them completely, and store the precooked dehydrated beans--which will cook very quickly in the future even if they're stored for several years. Otherwise you're looking at presoaking and then cooking 2 to 3 hours to infinity, depending on how old they are, whenever you want chili. (You can also buy precooked dehydrated pintos from Harmony House, but it's a lot cheaper to make your own if you can.)

The HH soup mixes depend on what's in them--that vegetable soup mix has dehydrated peas, which will probably take at least half an hour to soften up well if you just stick 'em in simmering water. Try a little and see. You can speed things up by soaking in cold water in the refrigerator overnight or from morning to evening--that will rehdyrate the stuff a lot, and it will cook much faster. Or you can put your veggies into the blender or food processor and powder them coarsely, including the peas, which will also make it all cook much faster if you don't need/want to see whole veggies in your chili, just want to add the flavor and nutrition.

Tomato powder is going to be cooked when it comes to a simmer--you pretty much cook it just as long as you need to blend the flavors in the dish. It isn't harmed by a longish simmer, though.

Canned chicken breast is thoroughly cooked--I usually recommend adding canned cooked meat towards the end of cooking, just to heat it through well and let it soak up a little flavor. If you want to flavor it through, marinate it with a little of the spice mix before cooking. If you are using quick-cooking precooked beans and ground veggies, you can saute it in the oil and spice to flavor it nicely because you will only be simmering it briefly after that.

I think spice mixes like chili and curry taste best if you heat them briefly in whatever oil/fat you are using to release the oil-soluble flavor components (careful--don't scorch them--just heat until they become nicely fragrant) and then add water to bring out the water-soluble components. But they don't require any cooking time to be edible, so it just depends on what you are using them in and how you are cooking it.

There are a lot of approaches, and they all result in pretty good chili because chili is just pretty good stuff, but I'd probably melt some fat in the pan (not just for flavor, but because beans without fat just aren't satisfying), stir the spices around very briefly, optionally stir the chicken around to get it nicely coated with oil and spice if you're using precooked beans, stir the veggies around briefly, add a little water, stir in the tomato powder to make a thick sauce/puree, then add the rest of the water and beans, stir well, and leave simmer on low until the veggies and beans are softened if using precooked beans. (That won't take more than 15 minutes if your veggies were ground up.) If using raw beans, toss in the chicken when everything is smellng good and the beans have softened and simmer just a little while longer. If I had raw dried pintos, I'd probably pressure cook them if I could, otherwise simmer them until at least half cooked before dumping them into the pot with the fat, spice mix, veggies, and tomato powder to finish up (some things like salt can slow softening, and heaven knows raw pintos take long enough without slowing 'em down any), and add the chicken towards the very end, previously drained into the pot for the water and let sit with a bit of the spices while the rest was cooking.

Re fat:*If you've got a lot of fat floating on the liquid in home-canned chicken, you can just scrape that off into a pan, evaporate whatever water came with it, and then proceed to saute your spices. Breast meat won't have much, though, unless you've mixed it with some nice fatty thighs. If you're using chicken breast commercially canned, especially canned in water, you will need some storage fat/oil to work with, which you need around anyway, so it shouldn't be a big deal. Just glug some olive oil or whatever into the pan, heat it up, and stir your spices around, etc. You're going to need to add some salt with your spices as well--the soup mix is just unseasoned veggies and the spice mix doesn't have salt either. But that's good because you can season to taste, and salt, like oil, needs to be part of your basic preps.

Rules of thumb for quantities:
Dry beans cook up to approximately 3 times their dry volume.
Precooked dehydrated beans are about twice the volume of uncooked dry beans and cook up to 1-1/2 to 2 times their volume.
Dehydrated veggies average half the volume of fresh veggies.
Tomato powder is just the dry components of tomatoes. You dilute for what you want.
Tomato paste is about 3/4 water by weight, so add 3 times your weight in powder in water to get tomato paste.
A cup of tomato powder is 57 to 60 grams.
A cup of water is about 225 grams.

The above info should let you convert any standard chili recipe to use storage food instead.

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Dry Pinto's with Dehydrated Vegetables Recipe Ideas