How to cook Bean soup(Gbegiri)

Ingredients for making gbegiri soup(bean soup)

1 cups Beans (white or brown)
Potash
Onions (2 balls)
Pepper
Palm oil
Seasoning (knorr cube, salt etc)
900g fish/meat – optional

Preparation

Step 1

We start by removing the seed coat; just transfer a cup of beans to a bowl, sprinkle a handful of water and start robbing and squeezing hard, as you progress the outer coat starts wearing off. This is actually the easiest beans de-coating method. Add water, wash, and strain (leaving the white split cotyledons). you should be done with this in about 10 minutes.

Then pour into a pot and start cooking with just water and about a half teaspoon of powdered potash, the potash act as a catalyst, most people use potash to hasten the cooking process while others avoid it for health or personal reasons.

Step 2
Cook for twenty to fifty minutes until it is very soft and ready for mashing. After that use a short strong neat broom to mash it till soft (there is often a broom kept for this purpose, the same that is used for ewedu soup). The reason for this is just to ground the already cooked beans to a seedless soft pudding.

There are different methods to making Yoruba foods, the gbegiri soup is not an exception. Some Yoruba uses a strong spoon and a plastic sifter for this purpose. They achieve the same end by pressing the soft seeds against the sieve with a spoon, it is that simple for most Yoruba foods. Alternatively, use an electric blender! 😀

Set the mashed beans apart in a clean bowl.

Step3

At this point most people just transfer into a pot then add the already cooked meat/fish, onions, seasoning (1 knorr cube), pepper, salt, 100ml palm oil and allow it to steam for 10 minutes then a delicious pot of gbegiri soup is made, or you can follow.

Step 3B
After following step 2 to a T, set your cooking pot on the burner, use about 10 to 15cl of palm oil, allow to heat then add sliced onions, mashed beans, pepper, other seasoning of choice (a cube of knorr or maggi), iru (locust bean), salt to taste, allow to cook for five minutes and you just made a delicious pot of gbegiri soup, one of my favorite Yoruba soup.

You can serve gbegiri with amala, fufu or eba.

Your food is ready.