The Huron Expositor, 1994-08-17, Page 23Bean Festival, August 17, 1994 - Page 7A
29th Bean Festival Souvenir Edition
Cooking beans for thousands of hungry festival -goers is a massive job, requiring plenty of volunteer help
and some rather Targe cooking vessels and utensils.
We've 'bean' cooking all week
QUESTION: What do you
get when you take 2,200
pounds of beans, 400 pounds
of bacon, 700 pounds of
coleslaw, 4,500 pork chops, 400
dozen buns, thousands of
pieces of pie and 20 kilograms
of salt, serve and PARTY!
ANSWER: The 29th annual
Zurich Bean Festival, what
else?
Zurich's major event of the
summer attracts an estimated
15,000 people to the village for
the one -day affair. While they
don't all eat beans, enough of
them do to make the famous
Bean Festival dinner a
massive undertaking.
Since 1985, Donna Thiel has
been the chief cook and bottle
washer for the Bean Festival
dinner. With her guidance
and the help of dozens of
volunteers, the supper
becomes a meal to remember,
year after year.
The beans which will be
served on August 27 are
carefully cooked, beginning a
week prior to the event.
This year, the cooking pro-
cedure will begin on August
20 and for the next seven days
hundreds of pounds of baked
beans are produced daily. The
cooked beans are then stored
in huge walk-in coolers until
the big day.
The recipe that Donna Thiel
and crew uses is baked beans
at it's biggest and best.
Ingredients include:
400 pounds of bacon ends
2,400 pounds white navy
beans
200 gallons ketchup plus
tomato juice as needed
secret spices from the Bean
Festival.
Method:
1. Wash and sort beans to
remove stones.
2. Have two 500 pound c-
ookers; place sorted beans
inside, add water and salt and
cook all day (about 10 hours).
3. Remove cooked beans from.
cookers and place in large flat
steel trays, add other.
ingredients including secret
continued on page 9