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Howdy, I just wanted to ask if it was possible to roast this type of soybean directly in a microwave popper contraption or a dedicated popcorn popper without any prior water work, just straight out of the box? And If they'd be edible if I did such a thing?
Edit: Honestly what confused me was this video, because the guy just threw them in the frying pan without any preparation or water usage and roasted them.
No, you can't cook dried beans just by roasting them. All this would do is it dry them out even more and that wouldn't make them more edible. Indeed, dried beans are used as baking beans to weigh down pastry during blind baking and they don't pop like popcorn.
All recipes for roasted soybeans require some combination of soaking and/or boiling before they can be roasted.
(Note we're not talking about fresh soybeans here, those are green and succulent.)
You can roast them straight out of a bag - you don't have to soak them. I've had loads of them for years when I was a child in my native country (Romania). The same we do with sunflower seeds, pumpkin seeds - which people eat at football matches (at stadium). If you want to splash some water and a bit of salt on them, so be it, they're even tastier.
Are these dried soybeans? I had never considered it before your question, but it seems to me that if you had an air popcorn popper (like the famous Poppery II), you could probably roast dried soybeans effectively this way, because it's similar to roasting green coffee beans, and that's what I use to roast green coffee beans.
