U.S. Department of Agriculture: Agricultural Research Service, Lincoln, Nebraska
Document Type
Article
Date of this Version
3-2017
Citation
Published in ANNUAL REPORT OF THE BEAN IMPROVEMENT COOPERATIVE, Vol. 60, March 2017.
Abstract
INTRODUCTION - Cooking time and sensory quality are two important traits when selecting dry beans for consumption, but have largely been overlooked by breeders in favor of yield and other traits. Dry beans are an affordable, nutrient-rich food, but often require long cooking times, particularly without prior soaking. They also display a range of sensory characteristics, with consumers preferring cooked beans that are sweet and soft1. Increased interest in dry beans to make new products necessitates studies assessing the diversity of sensory traits in beans, which would allow beans to be selected for specific products. In this study, the Andean Diversity Panel2 (ADP) was assessed for cooking time and sensory characteristics in order to identify diversity for these traits.
MATERIALS AND METHODS - Cooking Time Evaluation: 398 genotypes of the ADP were harvested in Hawassa, Ethiopia in 2015, six months prior to evaluation. Prior to cooking, each sample was soaked for 12 hours in 250 ml distilled water after ensuring moisture content was between 10-14%. Two replicates per genotype of 25 seeds each were cooked in random order in boiling distilled water using the Mattson cooker method for determining cooking time3. The Mattson cooker uses twentyfive 85g stainless steel rods with 2mm diameter pins that pierce beans loaded in wells when sufficiently cooked. For this study, the 50% and 80% cooking times were recorded, and the 80% cook time is regarded as the time required to cook each genotype to completion. The cooking time data was analyzed using the MIXED procedure in SAS with genotype as a fixed effect and rep as a random effect.