Dry Beans, Part 1: How Do I Cook These?!
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NOTE: This, and next week’s Part 2, are reposts from earlier in the pandemic. I am getting a lot of questions about beans, so rather than filling Ask Allie columns with those answers, makes the most sense to do this series again!
As happens every time there’s a 2-part series on something, I had an overwhelmingly large amount of stuff to say. I figure that instead of doing that to y’all, may as well save some for Part 2! So! Part 1 is your basic cooking methods stuff, and in Part 2 we will put together enough options for several 12-course meals! Go big or go home, amirite? Oh wait. I’m already home, but still going big!
Do people outside royal families even do 12-course meals anymore? I hope they have staff if so, and in particular a scullery maid, because woah dishes!
For a lot of people, beans before Covid-19 happened only in restaurants or cans, if at all. And then, as y’all know, the cans sold out and the restaurants closed. With rising concerns about potential meat shortages, beans seem to be flying off the shelves with a quickness again. At least that’s what my partner, the main shopper for our home, tells me when he brings tidings of the outside world to us. As such, this seems like an excellent opportunity to figure out what to do with whatever dry beans you were able to access!
The first things you need to know are these:
1 pound of dry beans is the same as 3.5-4 cans of beans. If you wind up liking using beans from dry, you really cannot beat the price!
They have no expiration date if they’re stored properly (cool and dry). I have personally cooked beans that were over a decade old, and the only issue I had with them is that they took longer to cook, and definitely benefit from pre-soaking in ways normal dried beans don’t. Don’t ask me why or how I sometimes lose a bag of beans for that long, because I don’t understand it either. It seems to be an occasional thing for me, though, where I find a weird kind of bean, say to myself, “huh! Didn’t I buy those when I lived in [insert entirely different city or state]? Why haven’t I eaten these yet? Let’s see what happens!” I am a great lover of “let’s see what happens,” often to my family’s consternation.
Many people will tell you that you no longer have to sort beans. I fundamentally agree with this, since the bad beans generally are floaters. There are always some that are still floaters even after you’ve pushed them down (those are the bad beans), so I just remove them at that stage. But what you do need to do is sort out rocks. Almost every bag of beans will have at least one pebble in it, so it’s best to sort. As a life-long olive lover, I am “trained” to avoid biting down hard on anything until my mouth is sure it’s safe: what I know about dry beans is that when I don’t sort them, I’m always glad for the Lessons of the Olive Pit at least once! Over the holidays last year, those lessons saved a molar when I bit down into a piece of fruitcake and it had a pit in one of the cherries! The company who made it was, of course, super cool about it and was grateful to know that some cherries erroneously made it through the pitting process so they could double down on their quality control checks (a response I love to see!). I honestly was glad it’d been me who got the pit, because I am pretty sure I’m the only one who was eating it that’s also trained to bite softly! This is the only fruit cake I will eat, and don’t tell me about it if you don’t check these out because I will think you’re off your rocker to not give these a try - don’t forget the apricot one! They are worth the cost of the cakes, believe me. I’m not a cake guy, or really a sweets in general guy, but I can plow through one of these in a single sitting, sharing be damned! Wow, look at that alliteration there. I normally fail hard at alliterative writing!
It’s a lot easier to cook beans from dry than anyone seems to want to admit to. But as you’ll see, it’s simple! I think dry bean cooking feels hard because it’s more involved and does take a good while to do.
You do have to do some pre-planning. Personally? I use Outlook and the alarms on my phone for this. It’s the only way I remember anything I need to, including my own anniversary! Thankfully, he’s as entirely lacking in sentimentality as I am, so whenever I mention that Outlook said we’d been married however long we have, he’s equally surprised and glad for the reminder! Even if you skip the pre-soak, though, you still need to plan for cooking yours 2-3 hours before you need them, just in case you run into a SNAFU situation.
Keep a couple of cans on hand, if you can, for days you didn't plan ahead all that well. OR! you can freeze beans cooked from dry! Put your portion of (drained) beans in a container, cover with water, chuck in freezer!
For storing your precooked beans, I really can't speak highly enough of peanut butter jars. The one-pound jars, filled with beans to the bottom of the neck, are basically the same volume as your bean can, making portioning a snap!
Pre-soaking is optional. The reality is that your beans do cook much more uniformly with a pre-soak, but sometimes I dismiss my alarm before I start performing the task at hand (in this case, bean soaking; most of the time those “I’ll deal with that later” dismissals are about watering my indoor garden or waking up at a certain time that isn’t dictated by the Child Tester). I’m sure some of y’all also have bad memories (forgetting and finding soaking beans that are really just fermenting bowls of yuck by the time you encounter them again, which I don’t recommend), or just a total lack of inclination toward pre-soaking, and if that’s you then you should feel no guilt about eschewing this step entirely. Many people say not to pre-soak with salt in the water. Hogwash, I say! To date, I have never seen beans refuse to presoak well, toughen up, need to cook longer, or any of that jazz on account of salt additions. Doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen, but the conventional wisdom here has certainly never applied to my life except with old beans.
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How do I even cook these things?
A few ways! If you are using a crockpot (my personal favorite), you can cook any kind of bean you can (could?) commonly buy except kidneys in it. Kidneys contain phytohaemagglutinin (PHA), a lectin, that may harm or kill you (section 4.2.8 of this study talks specifically about kidney beans and crockpots). No real nice way to say that, unfortunately, so we’ll just call it what it is - dangerous if undercooked or uncooked. Crockpots, unfortunately, do not get hot enough to ensure that any, let alone every, kidney bean will be fully cooked, and research indicates that a partially cooked kidney bean can be a deadlier one, indeed. You’re going to need to do those in the stove or pressure cooker. Sorry ‘bout that, y’all!
To make crock pot beans!
Sort any stones out of your beans, then push them off the counter and into your crock.
Boil water. Optional, but you need water either way, and using boiling makes them cook faster.
Add a bit of salt, then pour in your boiling water.
Put the lid on (oddly, I never slam these ones!) and turn your crockpot on if it has an switch or button for that.
Walk away and come back in 6 to check on it. Depending on your model and setting, it can be done as early as 6-hours. If your beans are super old, I’d anticipate 12 no matter what. In reality, what I actually do is put these together before I go to bed (usually a couple of hours before, but whenever I remember) and they’re done in the morning!
Don’t forget about your dip sized crock pots! They make about a can’s worth, in the event you don’t feel like dealing with leftovers.
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To cook beans on the stove!
Using fresh water (so not what you soaked them in, if you soaked them at all), put water and your beans in your pot. Conventional wisdom says to use water to cover plus a couple of inches. Absent-mindedness says to fill the pot up almost to the top. Occasionally I still burn some of them, which happened to me last week. I tipped out what was still good and sadly put the burnt layer on the bottom in the hidden compost area of my garden. Don’t tell my complex about that area - the landscape guys kindly haven’t!
Bring to a boil, then turn the stove down and simmer for at least an hour before checking them to see if they’re done. Sometimes this takes 3 hours. Old beans generally need 3; you can see I encounter old beans (though not super old ones; that’s an occasional issue) fairly routinely, and this is because I usually buy a few years’ worth of each bean I need at a time when I replenish my stores. If you did not soak them overnight, nothing really changes. You just bring to a boil for 3 minutes, skip the conventional hour wait after they boil for the “quick soak,” and simmer on with your day.
Also counts as a stove! This is a strong simmer, for reference.
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Oven method!
Not talking about baked beans here, y’all. That’s a thing we’ll get to next week!
What you’ll do is this:
Preheat oven to 325F/160C/GM 3.
Put the beans (soaked or not) in a Dutch oven or casserole dish or whatever it is you bake in. I badly want a proper bean pot, so if you have one, use that! Make sure that vessel is big enough for the beans to grow to approximately 3x their dry size, to avoid pitfalls. Did anyone else play that game on their Intellivision as a kid? I never got good at it, but wow I loved that game. Or maybe y’all come from Atari families, which means you had way more games than we did!
Add water to cover, plus an inch or so.
DON’T FORGET THE SALT!!!!!!! Maybe here is a good space for salt pork or ham hocks, but maybe not?
Put the lid on tightly, put in oven, and bake for around 75 minutes. Your memory and timer may vary. If you don’t have a lid, foil works too. Many sources advise a 15-minute boil on the stove first, if kidney beans (because yeah, you really can do kidneys in the oven even though I excluded it above), to prevent any inadvertent partial cooking.
Check them to see if they’re done. If so, good to go! If not, replenish water if it’s starting to look dry, then lid and 15 minute increments between checks until they’re tender!
I know I said no baked beans yet, but this picture made me so hungry it seemed I should share! I feel like BBQ is on the menu for my next #takeouttuesday now!
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The pressure is on!
For the pressure cooker section, I’m honestly not going to be super helpful. But know that you can cook them in there, and faster - even when accounting for Depressurization Time of Doom!
My Instant Pot manual (thanks, Sabrina, both for the gadget-y gadget of untold buttons and for dealing with my resistance to having one!) says 7-minutes. My old pressure canner’s manual said 2. So check the instructions in your model’s manual, because too short means uncooked and too long means mushy beans. Blech! Child Tester, who is so great a lover of beans that I often wonder if she’s secretly Tuscan, would tell me exactly where I could go with my mushy beans if I tried to serve them to her!
For this week, y’all’s job is to just get cozy with the dried beans and comfortable in your (maybe new) skill set of cooking them! Get your freezer stocked, because you are not going to want to have to do all the prep for all the wonders we’re gonna show you next Sunday - happy beaning!
Legit, I often would wonder if she were switched at birth if she didn’t so look like him! But somewhere, there’s got to be a Tuscan she got her bean craze from!
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