Master Dry Beans: No More Mushy, Uneven Beans

Beans could kill you? Who knew? Giving bean cooking advice is difficult. It's similar to giving parenting advice. No matter what you say, it will sometimes backfire. And that's because all children are different and all beans are different. Not only are chickpeas completely different from cannellini. Each bag of chickpeas is different from every other bag. If you've ever cooked beans only to find half of them falling apart, while the other half is still hard, you know that even within the same bag, there is a lot of bean diversity. In this video, we'll compare different beans and different cooking methods to help you make better decisions about how to cook different bean varieties. I'll go through all the typical problems people encounter when cooking dry beans and offer you solutions. If you are already cooking dry beans successfully using some other method, there is no need to change. Stick to what's working for you. But if you are struggling, I hope this video is helpful. What? Beans could kill you? Who knew? Since I don't read books about nutrition, words like lectins were not in my vocabulary. I only learned about them when I started researching cooking beans in a slow cooker. I've been doing it for years with no ill effects, but site after site warned me about the danger of slow cooking beans. Apparently, slow cookers might not be hot enough to deactivate all lectins found in raw beans. Lectins are proteins found in beans that people can't digest. In other words, if you eat raw or undercooked beans, you can get a terrible stomach ache, vomiting, and other gastrointestinal upset. Very unpleasant. If the beans in question are kidney beans, it's downright dangerous to eat them without thorough cooking because they contain a type of lectin that causes red blood cells to clump together. So don't worry. Most beans can't kill you. Just the kidney beans. How come people have been cooking beans for centuries without worrying about lectins? Because by the time your beans get even close to edible, all the lectins have been destroyed. Here is what it takes to destroy lectins in kidney beans according to a 1983 paper from Journal of Food Science. This advice gets generalized on most websites as the following. Beans must be soaked overnight and then boiled for 10 minutes before the heat is turned down to low. What happened to 176 for 2 hours? It got dropped from laypeople discussions of bean cookery for a couple of reasons. Maintaining any temperature besides 212 is difficult for most cooks. Boiling is obvious. It's water with big bubbles. Everything else is a bit murky. A simmer for little bubbles is about 205. Below that, you need a reliable thermometer. 176 is way too low to produce standard results. For the beans to be tasty, you need at least 190. But regardless of how you cook the beans, here is the reality. The temperature and time combination that will soften them is more than sufficient to deactivate the lectins. If you are worried, don't eat the first bean. Put it between 2 spoons and squash. If you can flatten it, it's safe to eat. That doesn't mean it's soft enough to be pleasant, but it's soft enough to not cause any harm. That being said, some people get stomachaches from beans even when they are cooked properly. If they don't agree with you, just don't eat them. Problem 1. My beans are all broken up. Beans break up because you cook them for too long, you bounce them too much, or you are cooking them without salt. Some beans like chickpeas are very sturdy and they don't mind water moving, in other words, simmering. Others like cannellini are ridiculously delicate. They can't handle a simmer. They need a very gentle heat and plenty of salt. Not salting the beans until they are done is an old wives tale. Salt makes the skins more stretchy and helps them expand with the bean without cracking open. So if your beans are all broken up, salt the cooking water generously. Cook them at a lower heat, the water should be barely moving, and check up on them more frequently. Problem 2. I've cooked my beans forever, but some are still hard. Beans cook for a very long time. Even with an overnight soak, some varieties can take over 2 hours, like these giant beans. But if they are stuck with the same chalky texture for hours, they might be old. If the beans sat in your cabinet or in the store for too long, they might never soften or soften very unevenly. The batch that's giving you trouble right now is a lost cause. But the next time you cook these beans, try an overnight baking soda and salt soak. From my experience, baking soda tenderizes the beans that refuse to tenderize any other way. It's more than just a speed up. It's a complete game changer that I've learned from Nick Sharma's article on SeriousEats.com. I've been struggling with chickpeas forever until I discovered this technique. No matter what brand of dried chickpeas I would buy, most of them refuse to get completely tender. No matter how long I cooked them, there was just a hint of chalkiness left. With a baking soda soak, they cook to perfect chalkiness. Combine 36g salt. Any salt type will work. 10g baking soda and 2 liters of water. If you don't have a scale, look at the nutritional information for your salt and baking soda on how to convert these weights to teaspoons and tablespoons. The liters of water are clearly marked on any Pyrex measuring cup. It will look like a lot of salt, but almost all of it stays in the soaking water that will be dumped. The beans will not be salty at all. If anything, they'll likely need more salt while cooking. The next day, dump the soaking water, rinse the beans, cover them with fresh water by 2 inches and cook them in a pressure cooker or simmer on the stove top. If you are using an instant pot, pressure cooker high setting takes 25 minutes with natural release to get my chickpeas to perfect creaminess after an overnight baking soda soak. If you don't have a pressure cooker, a gentle simmer at 205F without a lid works great too and takes a bit over an hour. Although the exact time will vary no matter what method you choose, the important thing is that your beans cook evenly and get completely creamy without exploding. The only beans that haven't benefited from the baking soda soak, in my experience, were the delicate cannellini and other small white beans. Problem 3. I don't have time to babysit a pot of simmering beans. Cooking beans on the stove top requires 1 to 2 hours of your time. Every 15 minutes or so, you need to check up on them to make sure the water stays at a bare simmer and doesn't evaporate too much. If you cover the beans after the initial boil is reached, the pressure will build up and the water will boil too hard and the beans will break up. That's why beans are cooked without a lid. But that means that the water can evaporate and the level might drop so low that the beans won't be covered. If that happens, you need to add more water and re-stabilize the temperature to a bare simmer. I work from home. Even I find this annoying, so no wonder normal people don't cook dry beans. But there are two great solutions to this problem. Pressure cooking and sub-simmer cooking. Both eliminate the need to pay attention and allow you to leave the house. Pressure cooking works great for sturdy bean varieties that don't have the tendency to explode. Catching a precise moment with a pressure cooker is impossible. If you release the pressure by opening the steam valve, the liquid inside will bubble vigorously and break up all your beans. That's why you want to use natural release. In other words, just let the pressure drop naturally once the cooking time stops. Pressure cooking is like traveling by plane. It's fast, but not very precise. A plane can get me to the Boston area, but it can't get me to my house in Maytag. Technically, a soak is not needed if you are pressure cooking your beans, but they'll cook faster, more evenly, and reliably if you pre-soak them especially if you add baking soda. This is the method I use for my black beans, pinto beans, kidney beans, chickpeas, and other sturdy varieties. An electric pressure cooker can be left to its own devices, so there is no need to be home while your beans are cooking. If I ever need beans in a pinch and I don't have time for an overnight soak, I just increase the time and pressure cook them. Another option is a very long sub-simmer cooking. I used to call it slow cooking, but that can be misleading since some slow cookers can't maintain the right temperature over a long period of time. The optimal temperature for beans is between 190F and 200F. At this temperature, the water is not moving and beans stay as intact as possible. If some are done and others are still hard, you can keep cooking them until they all soften. Since there is no possibility of a boil, covering the beans is fine, so there is no worry about evaporation. This is ideal for delicate white beans. Although this method is rather slow, it requires the least amount of active time or attention. Just put dry beans into some device that can maintain 195F, cover them with lots of cold water, add the salt, and let them do their thing. Cannellini will be done in 7-8 hours and something huge like these giant beans can take 15. While they are cooking, you can be sleeping or working. Most devices that can maintain a specific temperature can be programmed to turn off by themselves. This is as hands off as beans get. If this sounds like sous-vide cooking, that's because it is. The reason I don't use an immersion circulator for it is that it's clunky to set up. You can't put beans right into the water bath. Putting them into bags is somewhat messy and I don't like to use plastic at high temperatures. This means that I need to set up a pot inside another pot and I need to find some way to cover the whole thing so that the water doesn't evaporate. It's a lot easier to do this if you have a well functioning slow cooker or a multi-cooker with a sous-vide setting. The first time you do this, you'll need to monitor the temperature carefully to figure out how your machine behaves, but once you find a system that works, this method is incredibly easy and produces amazing results with no pre-soak. While most cooks soak the beans overnight, I cook them overnight. By the time I am up, the beans are not just soaked, they are ready to eat. I find that these beans are also the easiest to digest. The cooking time is so long that it breaks down the starches that are typically difficult to digest more than any other method that I've tried. This is a modern equivalent of putting the beans into a ceramic pot and leaving them overnight in a wood-burning stove that is slowly cooling off. This is very common in most bean cooking cultures. Most of us don't have ceramic bean pots and wood-burning stoves, but a multi-cooker on sous-vide setting and some slow cookers can produce the results that can rival a Tuscan grandmother. I recently made a video on my trials and tribulations making this work with my Instant Pot Pro, so check out that link below. Of course, every rule has its exceptions. I told you beans were hard. In this case, it's chickpeas. Sometimes even 15 hours isn't enough to soften them completely without a baking soda pre-soak. In my next video, I'll be using my favorite bean of all time. The giant bean. If you buy beans from Rancho Gordo, this variety is called Royal Corona. These beans are very common in Greek and Turkish cooking. If you are buying them from a Middle Eastern store, they are called giant. Just to clarify, giant beans are not the same as large lima beans. Lima beans tend to be chalky even though they look similar to giant beans. Giant beans take a freaking long time to cook, but they are very forgiving and cook to delightful silkiness. This bean works well with every cooking method I described in this video, so let's use it as an example to give you a specific bean recipe. Put the beans in a pot. Add water and salt. Bay leaf is optional. Cook at 195F for 15 hours. In a large bowl, combine 36g of salt, 10g baking soda, and 2L of cold water. Stir to dissolve. Add the beans and soak overnight. Drain and rinse. Put them in a pot. Cover with water by 2 inches. Add an optional bay leaf. From here, you have 2 options. Pressure cook with a natural release or stove top simmer. If you are using an instant pot on high pressure, I would try 40 minutes with a natural release and adjust next time. If you are simmering on the stove top, cover the pot and bring to a boil. Then uncover, reduce the heat so that the water is at a bare simmer. It should measure around 205F. Maintain this temperature and add more water as needed until the beans are perfectly tender, about 2.5 hours. Taste and correct the salt. When your beans are done, don't drain them and don't use them for at least an hour or their skins will burst. If your beans fell apart more than you hoped, let them cool completely in their liquid overnight. You'll be amazed how much their texture will improve by the next day. Beans can be stored for up to a week in their liquid in the fridge. For longer storage, you can freeze them using the following method. Cool them completely in their liquid. Drain the beans reserving the liquid in a container. Put the beans into a ziploc bag and freeze the beans and the liquid. Some other things to keep in mind. Not only are all beans different, all water is different. Some towns have harder water and some softer. This means that relying on other people's cooking times is difficult. So don't forget to keep careful notes and adjust the next time. I'll put my cooking times for different bean varieties in the description below, but take them with a grain of salt. Here are more thought provoking culinary videos for you to check out and if you are ever in the Boston area, maybe I'll see you in one of my classes.