Cooking with Dried Beans

I used to think I didn’t have time to cook with dried beans. They take too long to get soft! When I get home from work, I need to make something that is ready sooner than 2 or more hours from now. I’m nearly going to bed at that point and I certainly do not want to be eating.

 I used to think I didn’t have time to cook with dried beans. They take too long to get soft! When I get home from work, I need to make something that is ready sooner than 2 or more hours from now. I’m nearly going to bed at that point and I certainly do not want to be eating.There are a lot of reasons I wanted to cook with dried beans. They are much less expensive than using canned beans. I can buy a pound of beans for the same price I would pay for 1 can of beans, but the canned beans are only 1/3 of the amount I would get out of a pound of dried beans once they were cooked. Dried beans don’t have the food additives, including salt, which canned beans can have. I can be more flexible in flavoring my food when I use the dried beans instead of working with what the canned beans already have in them. Intuitively, I feel that the nutrition profile of dried beans is better than that of canned beans, although I do not know that for a fact.

 I have now found a way to cook with dried beans which fits conveniently into my schedule! I make my own ‘canned’ beans in the crock pot. In order to do this, you need to know the evening before that you will need beans for tomorrow’s dinner. Dried beans must be soaked prior to cooking in order to start softening the tissues of the bean. The evening before, rinse the beans and pick over them, discarding any that don’t look good or any small stones or chunks of dirt that may have made it into the beans. Place the beans in a bowl, covering them with water. Keep in mind when choosing a bowl that the beans will expand during soaking and will nearly double in size. When you cover them with water, you should have at least 2” of water above the level of the beans in the bowl. Leave the beans to soak overnight.

 In the morning, drain the beans and rinse them. This step is important as part of the purpose of soaking is to remove enzymes in the beans which can cause difficulty in digestion. Put the beans into your crock pot and cover with water. You do not need as much water as when soaking. You should be able to put in enough water to come to the same level as the beans or just a little over. You can add seasonings at this time if you wish – salt, herbs, chopped onion – or you can just cook them with water. Put the cover on your crock pot, set it on low and go about the rest of your day. By the time you go to prepare dinner, the beans will be the consistency of canned beans and can be used just as you would the cans.

 I have done this with many different kinds of beans and it has worked well. Kidney beans seem to cook quicker than other kinds of beans I have cooked with this method and will become quite mushy. I think you can only cook kidney beans this way if you are going to mash them in a recipe. Different crock pots may cook at different speeds, so you might want to try this sometime when you will be around the house and can monitor the consistency of the beans so you will know how long it will take the beans to cook in your crock pot.

 Karen has been baking and cooking since she was about 10 years old. She is also an accomplished cake decorator and a member of the Confectionary Artists Guild of Orlando. Currently, she does once a month cooking – spending a Sunday afternoon making several meals, packaging them into serving size portions and putting them in the freezer. Karen has been a vegetarian for essentially her entire life. Her husband, Chris, is not a vegetarian so all the recipes Karen submits for this site will be taste-tested by him to ensure appeal to non-vegetarian palates! Karen and Chris have been married for just over a year and do not yet have any children. They have three cats – Pepper, Puck and Tiger!