Do you need to soak dried beans first?
Do you always reach for canned beans because you can’t be bothered to soak dried beans for twelve hours? Maybe that isn’t necessary at all.
The general advice is that you should always soak dried beans first. Some recipes say that ‘only’ 90 minutes is enough, while others say you should do it for twelve hours or overnight. To settle the matter once and for all, the website Epicirious investigated what the truth is.
When you buy canned beans, they have already been cooked and you can eat them straight away. Dried beans need to be cooked first, and that takes quite a while. The idea behind soaking beans is that they will ultimately need less cooking time. More prep, but once you actually start cooking, things go a lot faster. Or do they?
Don’t do it
Epicurious tested this with kidney beans, soaking half of them in water overnight and cooking the other half straight away. What did they find? The soaked beans were indeed ready a little faster, but the difference was a meagre ten minutes. And since kidney beans need to cook for around 40–50 minutes, ten minutes more or less doesn’t make all that much difference anyway, right?
Quick soak
Some recipes recommend quickly soaking beans. To do this, bring water and beans to a boil and turn off the heat as soon as the water boils. Then leave the beans to stand for an hour before actually cooking them. The difference in cooking time is five minutes compared with beans cooked immediately, but Epicurious rated the flavour as the very best. Got time to spare? Then you know what to do.
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