How to: cook dried beans, but make them really delicious

You dutifully bought a bag of dried pulses (very good, one!), and suddenly realize that you’ve actually never made them before… Were you supposed to soak them? Or not? FavorFlav to the rescue! Here we’ll tell you which beans benefit from a night in a little bath, and which ones don’t.

Sure, canned or jarred beans work perfectly well, but since you’re sitting at home for days on end anyway and have time for things like regrouting tiles, pulling weeds and cooking dried beans, it’s fun to be surprised by the difference in flavor and texture between the factory-made and homemade versions of cooked pulses. For convenience, we’ll call them all beans for now.

Difference is a good thing

The tricky part is that, to determine with certainty whether you should soak your pulses or not, you’d really need to know how old they are. How long they’ve been dried and sitting in their packaging, as well as their quality. That’s virtually impossible to know. So it’s better to use this rough-and-ready method: with dried pulses with a thin skin, such as black beans, lentils and black-eyed peas, you can get started right away. They become mushy if you soak them. Those with a thicker skin, such as kidney beans, lima beans and chickpeas, are better left in water overnight before cooking.

Equal beans

That immediately ensures that all the beans in a package start from a more or less equal point. Although they keep for a long time, beans continue to dry out while sitting on the shelf. Some do this more than others, or were already older when they were packaged. Soaking allows the skins and insides to rehydrate, and they’ll cook more evenly.

Quick starters

Okay, opening a can is definitely faster. But soaking and cooking them yourself really gives them a richer, earthier flavor, and black beans, lentils and black-eyed peas can go straight into the pan. For example, you want to cook lentils until they’re quite broken down for lentil soup, but black beans are delicious when they’re not yet mushy, for example in a Mexican bowl with seasoned rice, avocado, cilantro, tomatoes and hot sauce.

How to cook delicious dried beans

The package usually includes instructions, but these are the steps we use for the most delicious beans:

• Put the dried beans in a shallow dish or deep plate and remove any that are discolored, broken or shriveled.
• Rinse them in a sieve or colander under cold running water.
• Put them in a pan and cover generously with water.
• They’ll swell, so make sure they’re well below the waterline; they should still be submerged even if they double in size.
• Stir a teaspoon of salt into the water – it shouldn’t be as salty as pasta water (which may taste as salty as the sea), but salty enough that you could still taste it without wanting to spit it out.
• Leave the beans at room temperature for at least 4 to 8 hours.
• If you leave them for longer than 8 hours, put them in the fridge so fermentation doesn’t start.
• Don’t leave them for longer than 24 hours.
• Drain them and start cooking them immediately.
• Put them in a pan and add cold water, about 10 cm above the beans.
• Add salt again, enough to make it pleasantly seasoned, and then add flavorings.
• This is very important! It will really take your beans from ‘meh, okay’ to ‘ooh, delicious’.
• Think stock-like ingredients such as a peeled onion cut in half, large chunks of carrot, leek, crushed garlic cloves, and some sturdy herbs such as rosemary and bay leaf.
• You can tie the garlic cloves and herbs in a piece of cheesecloth (you can fish everything else out later), because you’re already practically at Martha Stewart level anyway.
• Bring the water to a boil, then turn it down until it’s gently simmering. If you boil them too hard, the beans will knock against one another and break apart in the pan, so take it easy.
• Occasionally skim off the foam with a slotted spoon and, from the recommended cooking time onward, keep tasting a bean now and then until they’re tender.
• Add more water if necessary.
• Remove from the heat once you’ve tasted several beans and they’re all equally cooked.
• Let them cool in their cooking liquid, but first add some cold water to the pan to stop them from cooking further.
• Then drain them (if you’re going to use them fairly soon).
• You can keep them in the fridge for about 4 days, or freeze them in a container in their cooking liquid.

Read also:

• Budget cooking: chickpeas
• White bean soup with rosemary
• How to: cook when coronavirus anxiety has set in