STOP Adding Tomatoes to Your Beans Like This — Try This Old TEXAS FARM Trick

Everything I know in one place. The Cookshack Book: https://earlhargrove.shop/ Go to your pantry and turn over a can of diced tomatoes. Read the small print. Calcium chloride and citric acid. The first is a firming salt, the same stuff canners put in pickles to keep them crisp. The factory adds it so the tomato cubes stay cubes. It does the same thing to every bean in your pot. My daddy Roy fed fourteen men at a branding in the spring of 1961 out of one pot of pintos. They rode in by twos and threes from eleven till three, and the last man's beans were as good as the first man's. He put plenty of tomatoes in that pot. He just didn't put them in when you do. I'm Earl Hargrove. Eighty-four, cattle and a little field in Gonzales County, Texas. Forty years cooking for fifteen men at a time, out of one pot. In this one: why an OLD SACK of beans won't soften no matter how long you cook it, and why the beans themselves are the reason. Then the HARD WATER in your kettle that does the same thing, and the old rule that "salt makes beans tough," which is backwards: SALT AT THE START. We read THE CAN and what's printed on the back of it, then the FIVE-BEAN TEST, because tomatoes make a raw bean look done. TOMATOES LAST, only once the beans are as soft as you want them to stay. Then the SKILLET: fry the tomatoes down in lard before they ever touch the pot. And the eighth piece, Roy's, the reason he put tomatoes in at all, and how one pot held four hours without going to mush. The tomato isn't what ruins your beans. Putting it in first is. Safety, said plainly in the video: a hard bean is an undercooked bean. Undercooked dried beans will make you sick, red kidney beans worst of all. Don't serve them because you're tired of waiting. When did your daddy put the tomatoes in his beans? Tell me his name and what county he cooked in. I read every one.