I was having a conversation with someone about making a dessert from red bean paste and they mentioned the process being arduous because they had to cook the beans for two hours, and then mash them.
I knew that bean flours like besan is commonly used in cooking flatbreads in Indian cuisine, and those are made by grinding down chickpeas - something that takes hours to cook normally, gets reduced to five minutes as a flour.
Since red bean paste seems to be made by boiling beans and then mashing them, would the same step in reverse work? That is, grind them down to a flour first and boil them to form a porridge, as that should take far less time.
Secondary question: what is the difference between porridge and a paste, in this contex? Does cooking the beans and mashing them produce a different result from grinding them down and boiling the flour? (My intuition tells me no, but I'm not a chef)