Biting down on a rock in your food (soup, crock pot, consumer)

[uggabugga]

i remember my mom carefully sorting though every bag of pinto beans before cooking them. i don't remember how many rocks she found, but assumed it must have been at least a few, or she probably would have stopped doing it. even today, most dried beans, lentils, peas, etc. have a small warning advising to carefully sort and rinse before cooking.

i don't bother doing that, as i've gone through dozens of bags of pinto beans and never had an issue. however, last winter i made split pea soup and my wife bit down on a small rock that cracked a tooth and required a rather expensive crown to fix. so i was just wondering how often people actually sort through their dried legumes, and how often they find anything.

[oregonwoodsmoke]

Always sort and clean. I occasionally still find rocks. The sorting machines are a lot better at sorting the rocks out of the beans, but some still get through and into the consumer's home.


I will take out some beans that look like maybe they are moldy. At least they are discolored.


Pintos will have the most sorted out of them, but I have found rocks in black beans, which are normally the cleanest of the dry beans.


That expensive crown would have paid for a lot of hours of cleaning and sorting your dry beans.


It isn't time consuming. I drop a handful onto a clear pie plate, give them a careful look and then dump them into a colander. After all the beans have been sorted, I rinse them in the colander and then pour them into the crock pot. it's an easy project and doesn't take long. It's faster than rinsing all the lettuce leafs before making a green salad.

[evening sun]

I give them a quick look over. Don't remember ever finding a rock.

[lieqiang]

I've had the occasional bone in ground beef, I hate that. End up swirling my mouth around trying to spit it out without making a disgusting scene in front of everyone by doing full retch.

[harry chickpea]

I always check. I also discard any beans that don't look "right." I find fewer stones today, but have run across three or four the past couple years. In the 1970s I expected to find a few stones in just about every package.

The most surprising event for me was not beans, but I was once stung in the mouth by a bee that had been canned into a can of spinach.

[uggabugga]

Originally Posted by oregonwoodsmoke

That expensive crown would have paid for a lot of hours of cleaning and sorting your dry beans.

true. after years of having no issues despite not inspecting them, all it takes is one time.

[bagster]

I've reached the point I only use canned beans. The last black beans I tried to cook simmered for 3 days and never did get tender. That's a sure sign of old beans.

[happygrrrl]

I have never bitten down on a rock, but within the past MONTH, I have bitten on a chunk of bone in "premium" ground beef & bone piece in Tyson "boneless, skinless chicken thighs". I don't think food is being inspected as closely as it once was, no doubt due to the lack of workers unwilling to work for crap wages & work environment.

[ukiyo-e]

I bit down on a stone in a dish of rice in Zambia in 1987, spent the next month of that field trip with a cracked molar I couldn't use to chew with, and I still have the crown I got on that tooth when I returned home in 1988. 34 years is pretty good for a crown.

So yeah, I look.

[Formerly Known As Twenty]

Beans and legumes are always rinsed and sorted in my kitchen; dried fruits like prunes and cherries are, too. It's not worth cracking a tooth because I was too lazy or careless to take the time to properly prepare food for consumption.

It's rare that I have found stones in a bag of beans, peas, or lentils, but there are often beans that need to be discarded. I nearly always find at least two or three pits per box of prunes or cherries.