I can’t imagine why EVERY single recipe for bean soup doesn’t include baking soda, this is totally unexplainable.<<<
I have always added baking soda to the pot of beans, about a half teaspoon sounds right, sorry, I am a pour some in my palm and dump person.
I do not soak my beans and never found that it was worth while, we did as kids, but I check my beans for dirt clods and wash well, so quit the soaking.
You might try adding a big spoonful of ginger to the pot, I read that it helped cut the gas and tried it, don’t know about the cutting of gas, but the beans were good.
Fennel is also said to cut the gas in eating beans, LOL, so I add that too.
The reason to soak the beans, according to what a professor of pharmacology once lectured to a friend of mine, is to START the process of germination.
Just like when you plant a seed and water it.
The bean is a seed. The process of soaking the beans is necessary to start the process of germination in order that the protein of the bean can be fully digested & assimilated by the human. He said that otherwise the protein is bound up in some form which is totally unassimilated by the human digestive system.
Now, I have NO idea if this is accurate; at the time she took that college course, it was presumably the best info available.
I have read in the meantime that it is also very important to soak the beans and RINSE & CHANGE THE WATER AT LEAST TWICE, because in the skin of the bean are a number of undigestible sugars which can cause havoc in the intestines, and who knows what kind of sugar-food they provide to cancerous tumors in the body?? These dangerous indigestible sugars are removed by soaking the beans.
I find it really interesting that when you were young, it was customary for your parents to serve buttermilk along with a bean dish, that's so interesting... how people "know" certain things about foods, even though Science hasn't yet figured them out.