Heat to boiling and boil for an additional 2 to 3 minutes. Soak beans for 8 hours or overnight. Bring to boil and boil for an additional 2 to 3 minutes. Remove beans from heat, cover and let stand for 4 hours. Drain beans and discard soak water. NOTE: Cold water starts but does not complete the rehydration process so the beans will appear wrinkled after soaking.
They will fully rehydrate during cooking. Remove beans from heat, cover, and let stand for 1 hour. Rinse beans with fresh, cool water. For best results, follow these tips!
Keep cooking water at a gentle simmer to prevent split skins. Finally, soaking does absolutely nothing to reduce the gas-producing properties of beans. These may be difficult ideas to get used to, flying as they do in the face of everything most of us have been taught about cooking beans. One friend, an Arizonan, dismissed the idea out-of-hand, attributing it to my New Mexican background. But cooking unsoaked beans is not new. No less an authority than noted Mexican cookbook writer Diana Kennedy has advocated it for years.
In fact, the more I asked around, the more people I found who cooked beans this way -- mostly, it seemed, people from Mexican or Central American families -- although at least one prominent New American chef and another well-known French chef agreed.
The heat and pressure of the canning process called the retort is enough to cook -- perhaps even overcook -- the beans right in the can. First, I cooked three pots of beans: one soaked overnight, one quick-soaked brought to a boil and left to sit, covered for one hour , and one simply covered with boiling water.
To each pot I added a hunk of salt pork, some sliced onion and a bit of garlic. I simmered them slowly on top of the stove, covered.
The two soaked beans did cook more quickly than the unsoaked -- they were finished in about 1 hour and 15 minutes, as opposed to two hours. But when I sampled them, the extra 45 minutes paid off. The two pots of soaked beans were pallid compared to the unsoaked though the long-soaked were better than the quick-soaked. The unsoaked beans had a noticeably deeper flavor; they were firmer to the bite, and they did not break up as much in cooking.
Then came the ultimate test. I sat down with a big bowl of the cooked unsoaked beans after a little refrying with bacon and a handful of grated Monterey Jack cheese and ate lunch. I waited, half expecting to blow up like a balloon as a precaution, I did this test at home, alone. Nothing untoward happened. That experiment was far from scientific, but after talking to a couple of researchers who confirmed my results, I moved on to more phone calls and other tests.
All of us, it seems, have our own set of folk tales about cooking beans. In fact, Kennedy herself makes this claim. So I cooked beans with salt added 1 teaspoon per pound of beans turns out to be about the right ratio and without.
They cooked to exactly the same degree of softness in almost exactly the same time. Interestingly, though, to get the same level of saltiness in the unsalted batch of beans, I had to add more than twice as much salt. And even then, it was more a case of the broth being salty than the beans.
I cooked beans in three different pots -- earthenware, stainless-steel and unlined aluminum. There was some difference in the rate at which the beans soaked up water or, probably more accurately, the pans soaked up water.
The earthenware needed more water early but then seemed to maintain a steady level a little better. I could find little difference in flavor between the earthenware and the stainless-steel, but the unlined aluminum lent a distinctly metallic flavor to the beans. Only by cooking them in the oven is it possible to get the slow, steady pace they need, he claimed.
Delicious vegetarian recipes from barley bowls to pizza ». I cooked beans both on top of the stove and in the oven. With constant attention and a ready flame-tamer, I could manipulate the temperature well enough to keep the beans at a sufficiently slow simmer.
But, covered, in a degree oven, the cooking was almost effortless. All I had to do was check every half-hour or so to make sure there was sufficient water.
If you cook beans without a lid, some say, the result will be a firmer bean. Keeping the lid on? Your beans will be creamy. When we tested both methods, we found the beans with the lid cooked about 15 minutes faster, but the flavor of the beans cooked with the lid off was much better.
This is because the liquid reduced more, creating a more flavorful bean broth that coated the beans. Cooking dried beans is simple, but we heard that the process could be simplified even more by placing the pot in the oven. The beans ended up pretty creamy, but they took much longer to cook, and they didn't taste very good—according to my colleague Anna Stockwell, they tasted "water-logged.
One of the most persistent myths about how to cook dried beans involves salt. Some recipes advise not to add salt until the very end of cooking, because salt keeps beans from getting tender. Other recipes say to add it in the beginning, because, well, salt is flavor, and we're going to eat these beans, aren't we? In our test, we compared a batch cooked with salt added at the beginning against a batch made with salt added at the end, and guess what?
The beans that were salted early on were more tender. When you have too many beans on hand, there's only one solution. For the Epi Test Kitchen, the results were clear. Quick-soaking the beans, salting them at the beginning of cooking, and cooking in a pot without a lid resulted in beans with great texture and a flavorful broth. Here's how to cook dried beans, step by step. Place 1 lb. Add water until it's about 2 inches above the top of beans.
Cover pot, bring to a boil, then remove from heat. Let rest 1 hour.
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