Yes, you can eat the beans, and a lot more. Edible scarlet runner beans come from a generous plant that hands you several foods at once. You get bright red flowers, young green pods, fresh shell seeds, and dried beans for the pantry. One vine in the garden feeds you in four different ways across the season. Most gardeners grow it for the flowers and never realize how much food the same plant gives.
The flowers go first. They show up in midsummer and taste mild and a little crunchy, with a faint bean flavor. Toss a few raw into a salad for color, or scatter them over a finished plate. The flowers are the one part you can eat without cooking. They also draw bees and hummingbirds, so you share the bloom with the garden before you ever pick a pod.
Next come the pods. Pick scarlet runner bean pods while they are young and thin, around 3 to 4 inches (8 to 10 cm) long. At that size they snap clean and cook up tender like a green bean. Steam them or toss them in a hot pan with a little oil and salt. Wait too long and the pods turn tough and stringy, so check the vine every couple of days during the peak. The plant keeps setting new pods as long as you keep picking the ready ones.
Let the pods keep growing and you reach the next stage. Open a mature pod and you find plump fresh seeds, often purple and black with bold markings. These are your shell beans, and they cook much like lima beans. Simmer them until soft and they turn creamy and rich, with a flavor that holds up in soups and stews. You skip the soaking step at this stage because fresh seeds cook through in about 20 to 30 minutes.
At the end of the season you get the dried beans. Leave the pods on the vine until they go brown and papery, then shell out the hard seeds and store them in a jar somewhere cool and dry. Dried scarlet runner seeds have a chestnut-like flavor once you cook them, which makes them a favorite for hearty winter dishes. The big, handsome seeds also make great seed stock for next year's planting, so save your best ones back.
Here is the one rule you cannot skip. All the seeds must be cooked thoroughly before you eat them, fresh or dried. Raw seeds carry a natural lectin that upsets your stomach, and heat breaks it down. The flowers and tender young pods are fine, but the beans inside always need a proper cook.
For cooking runner beans from dried, soak the seeds in plenty of water for 8 to 12 hours first. Drain them, cover with fresh water, and boil hard for the first 10 minutes. Then keep them at a steady simmer until they go soft, which usually takes about an hour. Skip the long soak and the beans cook unevenly and stay grainy in the middle.
So the answer is a clear yes on every count. Eat the flowers raw, the young pods as a green vegetable, the fresh seeds like limas, and the dried beans cooked low and slow. In their native Central American range, gardeners even dig the starchy roots for food. Just cook every bean before it reaches your plate and this one plant earns its place in the garden several times over.
Read the full article: Scarlet Runner Bean Growing Guide
