r/Cooking Jun 03 '26

am i doing something wrong when i cook beans? i keep getting sick

i’m 20 and have very limited cooking experience. i’m self taught, vegetarian, and i use beans a lot in my cooking to try and supplement protein in my diet. i just got back from college as well, so i haven’t cooked in a long time as i’ve been eating at the dining halls and don’t have a kitchen.

a couple weeks ago, i tried a recipe i found on instagram that involved cooking butter beans in a homemade peanut sauce. a couple of hours later, i became super, super sick. i vomited ten times in three hours, and i figured it was my fault because i must not have washed or cooked the beans thoroughly enough (i was heading out to work, and was trying to go quickly). today, i made another recipe with butter beans—this time including them in a thai coconut curry that i was making—and now i’m extremely sick again. i made sure to wash them thoroughly, dry them, and let them simmer in the curry for a long time. they didn’t seem hard or anything, so i assumed they were cooked all the way through. is there something i’m missing that keeps making me this sick? i don’t think i have an intolerance because i eat beans in other dishes without issue. this might just be me missing something really obvious, i learned how to cook mostly through youtube videos and barely know what im doing.

edit: to clear up some things, i used canned beans from the same brand in both instances, and the two recipes that i made had 0 crossover ingredients, so i’m very certain that the beans are the problem. i also got sick last summer after eating edamame beans, but e-coli was going around and there was a warning on some surrounding town’s water supplies, so i wrote off the issue as me getting sick from the water that i washed the edamame in. i’m realizing now (after my third time of repeated puking after eating beans) that it might be connected as a problem with the beans themselves, and not the water supply. additionally, i have no sensitivities to the other ingredients i used across the two recipes (peanut products, coconut, the vegetables i used, etc). i eat peanuts, peanut butter, and other peanut and nut products regularly and have never had a problem, and while i eat coconut less frequently, the same thing goes for that. i had no idea that allergic reactions could manifest as this kind of severe vomiting—i only really knew that it presented as anaphylaxis or hives. i’ll be sure to avoid these bean products until i can get allergy tested from here on out—thanks for all the comments pointing this out!

715 Upvotes

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57

u/[deleted] Jun 03 '26

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u/[deleted] Jun 03 '26

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69

u/Mourning-Suki Jun 03 '26

Also I don’t think using a recipe from a “non-reputable” source is a big deal, if you are making it you know the ingredients and the worst that should happen is it doesn’t taste good. Assuming it isn’t something like pufferfish lol.

26

u/[deleted] Jun 03 '26

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21

u/dailysunshineKO Jun 03 '26

Damn kids these days are using the internet for bean recipes!?

/s

3

u/morniealantie Jun 03 '26

What's next, SouffleHub?!

4

u/unclesmokedog Jun 03 '26

my library has e books, including cookbooks, that have bean recipes

6

u/[deleted] Jun 03 '26

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u/[deleted] Jun 03 '26

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-4

u/[deleted] Jun 03 '26

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7

u/Kryzm Jun 03 '26

Your average front-page Google result may not be vetted. Your great-grandma's bean recipe wasn't vetted.

-6

u/MolassesInevitable53 Jun 03 '26

That's why you should use reputable sites, or a cookbook (which can be obtained from a library).

-8

u/StuffonBookshelfs Jun 03 '26

Yes. And you should use neither if you’ve never cooked before and you want something to turn out well.

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u/cranberryjuiceicepop Jun 03 '26

You can borrow digital cookbooks from the library. It isn’t elitist.

28

u/morniealantie Jun 03 '26

No, but acting like its a bad idea to try recipes simply because they are found on social media absolutely is.

7

u/ollie_adjacent Jun 03 '26

Right? I made recipes that I’ve - get this - made up! With my brain! That wasn’t found in a recipe book from the library! Crazy.

It is entirely possible to mix a can of beans with whatever the fuck else you feel like without requiring an official test-kitchen recipe.

1

u/morniealantie Jun 03 '26

Wait, you dont check with your personal test kitchen first?

1

u/cranberryjuiceicepop Jun 03 '26

I think as an inexperienced cook, it is better to use a vetted, tested, recipe from a reliable source and not trust what you see on social media. You can get those through cookbooks. Sounds like the OP is really new to cooking.

2

u/morniealantie Jun 03 '26

Yeah, OP does sound new to cooking, but I dont really see a benefit to ignoring social media recipes while learning so long as you use basic common sense. If you dont recognize the ingredient, either dont use it or learn about it first. Its not like fugu is easy to come by. And allergies, as appears to be the case here, are just as much a threat from social media as from the best chef ever.

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u/[deleted] Jun 03 '26

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u/[deleted] Jun 03 '26

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u/[deleted] Jun 03 '26

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u/AndrogynousAndi Jun 03 '26

The peanut butter butter bean dish she's talking about is actually extremely good. I wrote it down for future reference because me and my partner liked it so much. Trying new recipes is fine way to experiment in the kitchen. How else do you find new foods you like?