Cook Beans With This Powerhouse Ingredient For Easier Digestion

Beans are nutritious enough that we should all be eating more of them. But there is often one little drawback: their high fiber content can leave you feeling a little bloated. If that puts you off adding more beans to your meals, there's an ingredient you should cook alongside them: kombu. Kombu is a seaweed that has been cooked with dried beans in Japan and Korea for generations — and yes, it's usually added for flavor, but many people also swear by its ability to make beans a bit gentler on the stomach. 

As kombu simmers with beans, it releases glutamates (the amino acids responsible for creating umami), which gives the cooking liquid a deeper, savory flavor. But kombu also contains enzymes that help break down some of the complex sugars in beans, known as oligosaccharides. Your small intestine struggles to digest these sugars so they can ferment in your colon, causing discomfort. So, people reason that if you cook your beans with kombu, not only will it add flavor, it may also help your body digest beans more easily.

Kombu is the original foundation of miso soup and an important ingredient in Japanese cuisine. Some dishes call for quite a hefty amount, but for beans, historically, just a small piece of dried kombu — around 4 inches for a standard pot of dried beans — was added and cooked directly in the pot alongside the beans. Sounds simple, right? You can use this method for any style of lentils, chickpeas, split peas, and even homemade vegetable broths and soups, however, it might not be best for beans. 

Cookbook author (and former molecular biologist) Nik Sharma noted in his newsletter The Flavor Files that alpha-galactosidase (the kombu enzyme that breaks down oligosaccharides) is only active at quite low temperatures and becomes inactive if they are boiled. So if you're specifically hoping to take advantage of this enzyme for its anti-bloat effects, he recommends first warming soaked beans with kombu at around 140 degrees Fahrenheit using a sous vide device, slow cooker, or an Instant Pot's Keep Warm setting, then taking the kombu out and cooking the beans normally. 

So even if it doesn't totally cure bean-based bloat, kombu is still worth trying. In the best-case scenario, it helps you cook beans that are easier to digest; in the worst-case scenario, the beans just taste better for it.