Everything you need to know about cooking BEANS

Okay, okay. Today we're gonna talk about beans. Canned beans, dried beans, and I'm gonna show you how to make them taste extremely delicious. Let's start with canned beans. If you think the best way to eat these is straight out of the can, here are five more interesting ways to eat canned beans. The first thing you can do with canned beans is to make homemade refried beans. And we're gonna use either black beans or pinto beans, whichever one is fine. Once you've drained and rinsed the beans, heat up a large skillet over medium heat with a bit of oil, and once it's hot, add one small diced onion. Cook for six to seven minutes or until it's softened and a bit browned, and then add some chopped garlic, oregano, chili powder, and cumin to season, and cook for another one minute. Deglaze the pan with some vegetable broth and bay leaves to season, and then pour in the beans. Cook for five to ten minutes or until the beans have warmed through, and then it's time to mash them. You can use a potato masher, but I'm using an immersion blender to get them really creamy, though I do keep some of the beans whole because I want there to be a little bit of texture. Add some more salt to taste, and if the beans dry out, add a bit more broth, and cook for a few more minutes, and finish with a squeeze of lime juice. You can use these refried beans to make some simple tacos. Add some chopped tomatoes or salsa, pickled peppers, cilantro, and if you have extras like avocado or vegan cheese, you can add those too. And of course, you can also use the beans to make enchiladas or burritos. Taco time! This is very good with chips. Tortilla chip sandwich. Number two. This is my absolute favorite way to jazz up canned beans. It's basically making pan-fried crispy blistered beans. All you need to do is drain and rinse your can of beans. Chickpeas would be my favorite preference for this, but any kind of bean will actually work. You're going to rinse them and then dry them with some paper towels or a clean dish towel so they're not too wet. Heat up a large 12-inch skillet, which is a good size for a 15-ounce can of beans. Add a little bit of olive oil or your favorite oil, and once it's hot, you'll add the beans and let them cook undisturbed for three to five minutes until they start to blister. Then toss everything and let them cook for another three to five minutes. So after you do a slow jam with the beans, you'll add your seasonings, and you can vary your seasonings depending on the type of cuisine you're making or the type of meal you're making. Add some salt, some lemon juice or lime juice, and let everything cook down for a few minutes. It's gonna really really improve the texture and the taste of the canned beans, and it's something I do almost every week. You can serve these beans over rice, stuffed in sweet potatoes, or in a salad, which is what I'm doing today with some baby kale, tomatoes, and sunflower seeds. One of my favorite ways to make everyday pantry meals a little more interesting is by adding a really delicious condiment. Some of my favorites include pestos, cashew cream, and hummus, and obviously you can use chickpeas to make hummus. So if you've got canned chickpeas, I think, yep, canned chickpeas, it's a great use for them. But if you don't have canned chickpeas, you could also use cannellini beans or white beans. The hummus will be a little bit smoother and less thick, but it will still be really delicious. One of my favorite ways to use hummus is to make an open-faced sandwich. I spread a generous amount of hummus on flatbread or sandwich bread, top it with some greens or any veggies on hand, and add some hemp seeds or sesame seeds, and it makes a great light lunch or snack. Another way to give life to canned beans is by making them saucy. Saucy. I feel like every time I say the word saucy, I sound like a Long Island woman. Today, we're gonna be making some saucy beans. Actually, my favorite recipe for saucy beans comes from my cookbook, the Vegan Instant Pot Cookbook, and it's a recipe in cha- I can't, sorry, I just can't do this anymore. There's a recipe in chapter 3 for rosemary garlic white beans. They're saucy, they're delicious, and I hope you try them out. If you don't have my cookbook, though, here is an easy five-ingredient recipe for saucy white beans with kale. Start off by heating a large sauté pan over medium heat, and add one large diced onion with a pinch or two of salt, then pour in some water to prevent the onions from sticking, and cook for about five minutes or until the onions have softened and the water has evaporated. Add two cans of drained cannellini or any other white beans, and then pour in one can of light coconut milk and about 1 1⁄2 cup of tomato sauce. Add a generous amount of salt and pepper and stir to combine to ensure all the beans are coated with the sauce. Then add in one head of chopped kale or any greens of your choice. Bring it to a simmer and then cover the pan and simmer for 10 to 15 minutes until the sauce has thickened. You can serve this meal as is or to make it heartier, serve it with your favorite grain like millet, quinoa, or rice. We've already talked about pan frying beans to make them a little crispy, but another way to add more textural interest to your canned beans is by baking them in the oven. So you're gonna drain and rinse them as usual and then lightly coat them in some oil and add your favorite seasonings, whether it's fresh herbs or dried herbs and spices, some salt and pepper, maybe some whole garlic cloves. Put them in the oven at a relatively high temperature 400 to 450 degrees Fahrenheit and bake them for about 15 to 20 minutes until they've crisped up a little bit and have nice little brown spots on them. And if you have extra space in your oven, you can use it as an opportunity to roast some vegetables at the same time so you could have beans and vegetables together for a nice delicious meal. Now that we've talked about how to make canned beans a little more interesting, let's talk about dried beans. First things first, if you have an instant pot, it is really really easy to cook dried beans in the instant pot. I have a whole video on how to do that and some tips, so I've linked it in the description box below. But for now, let's talk about some basics. Number one, old beans are never going to be great beans. I'm sorry. It's just maybe they'll be mediocre, but they'll never quite be great beans. And that's because dried beans started out as fresh beans and then they get dried. And if they were dried two years ago versus being dried two months ago, they're gonna take a lot longer to cook. And if they're really old, they may just never soften. So if you have a really old bag of beans in your pantry, not really sure how they'll turn out. Number two, do you have to soak your beans? Yes. Yes, you do. I know that was probably not the answer you were hoping for. Although if you do have an instant pot, check out that video I mentioned that's down below because there is an option to cook unsoaked beans in the instant pot. And when you soak them, you're soaking them in water and it hydrates the beans, which makes them plump. You'll notice that they double in volume overnight. And plump beans are going to cook more evenly. They're going to be more tender, creamier, better tasting, and usually they're also easier for you to digest. Now let's talk about the basic cooking method for beans. We're gonna soak them. As I mentioned, drain them, rinse them, add them to a saucepan, a large Dutch oven, cover them with a few inches of water, and then you'll add a little bit of salt at this stage. Not very much. We'll add more later. And then you're going to bring the beans to a simmer. When you do add your beans to the cooking water, you have the opportunity to add other flavoring agents to make the beans taste a lot more delicious. You could do aromatics like a chopped onion, some chopped shallots, chopped carrots or celery, some smashed garlic cloves. You could also add black pepper, bay leaves. You could also do whole seeds. I really love adding whole cumin, coriander, or fennel seeds to beans. If you have fresh kind of woodsy herbs like thyme, rosemary, sage, oregano, those go really well with beans. And you're going to bring the beans to a simmer. Do not boil the beans because when you boil the beans, they get really excited. Like they're bumping up against one another. Think of it as like beans at a rave. That's cooking beans at a boil and they're just like bumping up, just like grinding on each other. Whereas we want to simmer the beans. So we want to be like at a classy jazz piano lounge where like everyone's kind of sitting in their comfy chairs not really bumping up against one another. Simmer your beans. Give them a loving jazz piano lounge environment. As for the exact cooking times, as I mentioned, it kind of varies based on whether your beans are new or old, on the variety of beans, the cooking method. But there are two things you can do to speed in the cooking process. So one thing is to cook your beans with a little bit of baking soda. If you add about two teaspoons of baking soda for one pound of beans or about one teaspoon for one cup of dried beans. And the reason this works is because if you remember from science class a long time ago, there is a pH scale from 0 to 14. From 0 to 7, everything is acidic like vinegars and lemon juice. 7 is neutral like water. And after 7 through 14 is everything is basic. And I don't mean basic boring. I mean basic alkaline. And baking soda is basic alkaline. So when you add baking soda to water, it makes it a slightly alkaline environment. And that is going to help beans cook more tenderly, more evenly, and more quickly. And the second thing you can do, though it doesn't shave off that much time, is to soak the beans in salted water. Kind of like a brine solution almost. You're going to use quite a bit of salt. Soaking them in that brine-like solution is also going to make the beans easier to reach tenderness. So you could try that out as well. While the beans are simmering, you'll notice that some foam starts to build up, especially when you have a large pot of beans. This is normal. Just skim the foam off using a spoon a few times during the cooking process, and simmer until the beans are tender. And once the beans are cooked through, you'll add a very generous amount of salt, give it a taste, and then simmer for another 5 to 10 minutes. When the beans are done, I like to finish them with a few different ingredients. A little bit of extra virgin olive oil for some richness, as well as something acidic to bring a little bit of freshness, like lemon juice, or apple cider vinegar, red wine vinegar, sherry vinegar. If you do add an acidic ingredient, wait until the end of cooking the beans to add them, because if we go back to our trusty pH scale, if alkaline ingredients are going to make it quicker for the beans to cook, then acidic ingredients are going to make it longer for the beans to cook. Now that you know everything there is to know about beans, if you have other pantry staples lying around at home that you need to use up, put a short little playlist together for you. It has some easy pantry-friendly recipes that I think you'll love.