No Need to Soak Dried Beans Overnight
Dried beans are a truly versatile kitchen product that everyone should have in their pantry. Not only do they last indefinitely, but they’re actually very easy to prepare and customize to create super delicious, inexpensive meals.
Part of the Skillet The Grown-Up Kitchen series , designed to answer your most basic cooking questions and fill in any gaps that may be missing from your home chef education.
What usually turns people off of dried beans is soaking. Soaking the beans before cooking is recommended to remove some of the sugars that cause the infamous digestive problems in beans, and to shorten cooking times. The tricky part is not putting the beans in a bowl and pouring water over it, but remembering to do this at night before you want to cook them.
Does this mean that the most forgetful of us should come to terms with eating canned beans? No. As with anything else, there are ways to work around this issue, and we’ll get to that soon.
What does soaking do?
Besides time management, there is also this delicate issue of digestion. While it is generally accepted that soaking the beans for extended periods of time not only speeds up the cooking process, but also helps reduce gas production, much of the evidence supporting this is anecdotal . However, if you have noticed that soaking the beans for an extended period of time helps prevent stomach problems, then soak my friend.
But if you’re in a camp, “soaking doesn’t help with gas anyway” – me and Kenji Jopez Alt are members – then the only thing you need to worry about is taste and texture. To see how soaking affected these things, I soaked the white beans for three different periods of time:
- Full Soak: This is for responsible adults who spend this together and may remember to soak the beans the night before. Simply rinse the desired amount of beans, then soak them in water for 6-8 hours, using the ratio of 3 cups of water to each cup of beans. (This soak time applies to stronger beans, such as white beans, chickpeas, beans, and so on. Some more delicate beans, such as lentils, can be soaked for as little as an hour. This table may help you with that.)
- Quick Soak: This is for the home chef who knows he needs beans at least a couple of hours before they plan to eat them. Rinse the desired amount of beans, then add 3 cups of water for each cup of beans to the pot of water. Bring the beans to a boil, let them simmer for two minutes, then cover the pot, remove them from the heat and let them hang for an hour.
- No Soaking: Beans are not soaked at all, just rinse them.
Get cookin ‘
Then I cooked five batches of beans: three on the stove, one (not soaked) in the pressure cooker, and one (not soaked) in the oven-oven method, which we’ll talk about a little later.
Take it easy now
Regardless of how long you soak them, it is very easy to cook beans on the stovetop. After the soak time (or lack thereof), simply drain the water, rinse again and place in a saucepan with aromatic additives (bay leaf, onion, garlic, maybe ham or a little salted pork). the same amount of water you used for soaking and 1/4 teaspoon of salt for each cup of beans. Bring everything to a boil, then reduce heat and simmer until you reach the desired level of tenderness. (The bag you bought the beans in should have an estimated cooking time, and this table is very helpful too.)
When the beans were cooked, I tasted them. They were virtually indistinguishable. All three batches, including the beans that hadn’t been soaked at all, were tender, tasting good, and fully cooked. They also reached my preferred doneness level (very mild) in the same time (about an hour and fifteen minutes), so the extra time in room temperature water didn’t really speed up anything. However, the beans were a little tousled and did not hold their shape very well. (I’m fine with that.)
Under pressure
Like cooking on the stove top, pressure cooking is very easy. Rinse the beans again and, using a ratio of 3 cups of water for each cup of beans, add them to the pressure cooker along with the desired flavorings. Cooking time depends on the legumes. This table breaks it down for pressure cookers, and for those of you using Instant Pot this PDF will prove to be very helpful. In terms of texture, pressure cooked legumes without rinsing were firmer and more palatable, but still completely edible. In fact, some of you may prefer this texture, I like the very soft, almost creamy beans, but pressure cooked beans without soaking actually hold their shape a little better.
Low and (not so) slow
Finally, I tried this 90 minute no-soak method from the poor chef . Using the same proportions of water and seasoning as for all other batches, I poured everything into a small Dutch oven, brought to a boil, then covered the pot and placed it in a 250-degree oven for an hour and fifteen minutes.
As you can see in the photo above, these beans hold up well. They were as flavorful as any other batch, and their texture was somewhere in the middle between pressure cooked and stove-cooked batches. In fact, some might even call them “perfect,” as they were beautiful and creamy on the inside, while still providing the least bite resistance.
Whichever method you choose to cook the beans is up to you, but know that you don’t need to pre-soak them for them to be normal or, in the case of the latter method, damn perfect. Once the beans are cooked, you can use them just like canned foods and add them to soups, chili peppers, stews, or simply eat them yourself. As for the white beans, I like to drizzle a little olive oil over them and grate a little lemon zest, or toss them in a food processor with a lot of garlic to make the white bean sauce. (Use honey fermented garlic for something really special.)