Canned beans suck. They taste like salty paste. I’m sorry, I know you probably use them. They are so easy. And we all know that this salty paste is very nutritious. Before your taste buds get familiar with perfectly cooked dried beans, the canned ones don’t seem all that bad. Until very recently I kept them around all the time because it seemed like every time I tried to cook a pot of beans from dried they were either undercooked (note: al dente is a phrase that should never even remotely apply to cooked legumes), or exploded and mushy. I have cried many, many times over wrecked beans I fed to the garbage disposal. But I kept trying (at least beans are cheap), and I now feel confident that I have hit upon a secret code for perfect beans every time.
Let me begin by telling you what I think the perfect bean tastes like. It holds its shape, the skin is intact, so as your teeth pierce it you feel a satisfying bite, but inside the texture is smooth and creamy, hearty and dense without being grainy or heavy. Beans have an amazingly complex flavor. They should be earthy and nutty with the barest trace of sweetness. The perfectly cooked chick pea reminds me a bit of chestnuts. You’ll never taste these things in canned beans.
The Method
Step one: Buy halfway decent beans. Heirloom varieties from specialty markets are wonderful, but as long as your market has regular turnover, you’ll be fine with a bag of Goya. (Hint: if you live in an area where a bean eating culture of some kind is not represented in the population, you might want gauge bean turnover by whether the bag is dusty. A dusty bag of black beans is probably never going to flower into the perfect pot of black beans.)
Step two: Preheat your oven to 250, put the dry beans in a pot, and cover them with water by about two inches. FYI, for this batch, I started with 2 cups of black beans.
For I have no idea what reason, nearly every recipe for beans I’ve ever read involves an overnight soak. At this point, I think this instruction was planted by the canned beans industry. Every pot of soaked beans I’ve ever cooked didn’t turn out well. We’ve all been brainwashed into soaking our beans, but stop. It doesn’t work well.
Step three: Add some meat. * Pork is best. I’ve used bacon, chorizo, ham shanks, and ham hocks. Shanks and hocks work best because there’s bone involved. I currently prefer the shank because there’s often just the right amount of usable meat to mix into the finished beans. Here’s the shank I used. I know it’s unappetizing and ugly. But just you wait.
Step 4: Bring the pot to a rolling boil, cover, and transfer to the oven.
Step 5: Wait. I set a timer for 45 minutes and then I taste. I return to the oven and reset the time for 30 minute intervals, tasting each time, waiting for the beans to become tender. For this batch, it took 2 hours. But the exact time depends on the particular beans you have. At this point, I stir in salt, about 1 teaspoon, put the lid back on, return to the pot to the oven, turn the oven off, and let the beans and their liquid cool completely in the oven.**
That’s when the magic happens. When they’re cool, remove the shank and pull the meat from the bone, discarding all the fat and other gross bits. Now your pork looks like this:
Considerably more appetizing, right? Stir it back into your beans.
This yields 6 cups of cooked beans. I divided them into 3 2-cup containers, putting one in the refrigerator for the next night’s dinner, and two in the freezer.
I saved all the cooking liquid in a separate container because that porky, beany broth will be the base for a killer soup later on this winter.
Yes, making the beans is time consuming, but it’s 90 percent inactive. You can be reading, watching a movie, cleaning the house, doing laundry, or whatever all at the same time. You have to do laundry anyway, why not make the most of the time?
Plus, now I have the basis of at least four more meals handy. I could simply defrost one container of beans and pork and the broth together, add a diced chipotle, a handful of cilantro, a tablespoon of tomato paste, and a squeeze of lime and have a terrific dinner on the table in 15 minutes. That’s my kind of convenience food. And it really is convenient.
* Or don’t add meat. This method works well without. But pork adds something amazing.
** From a food safety point of view, this might be dangerous. I don’t know if, during the process of cooling, the pork spends too much time in the temperature “danger zone.” I am not telling you it’s safe, I’m just telling you it’s delicious and that I’ve done it many times and not gotten sick or died.
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I agree, slow-cooked beans are superior to canned. We’ve been cooking our own for years and can’t imagine buying the cans now. We never soak them overnight, as it’s so easy to just get them going a few hours before dinner.
To decrease time in the “danger zone” try cooling the beans down more quickly by placing them in an ice water bath. I’m working with legumes next week in culinary school and can’t wait to make beans like this! I must confess, I have always used canned beans, but I have a feeling this will change!
Where do lentils fall on the “need to soak” scale? I mean, can I follow your instruction when using lentils?
Lentils never need to be soaked, they’re small enough that the water or whatever cooking liquid penetrates them fast.
I’m embarrassed to say I’ve never tried cooking beans from a dried state. I think i need to put that on my list of things to experiment with. As a person who loves cooking I don’t use a lot of already prepared ingredients…but beans just seems to be one of those things that I’ve always used from a can.
Guess i’ll need to be changing that.
Hi, Mandy! You know, I think you get a pass on the canned beans. I meandered over to your site, and I saw that you are student working with limited (if any!) kitchen space and a mini fridge. When I was your age, I wouldn’t have known a dried bean if it flew into my basket at the market. Maybe try them out at home with your family. But for now eat the canned beans. They are college-housing friendly and too good for you not to eat.
I’ve never had an issue with canned beans (and how they taste). Maybe I’ll do a bean experiment & see if people can tell the diffrence? The canned ones are just so darn easy…….who has time to do the whole bean process? But I promise I will try. At least once.
If you’re going meatless you still need some kind of fat, use a bunch of olive oil. The fat from the oil helps do something amazing to the beans. Olive oil maybe not the best flavor for black beans, but with white beans like canellini its great.