Cooking beans yourself is not horribly difficult. In fact, once you master the idea of barely simmering, they are downright easy to cook. You will get far more flavor cooking your own beans, and you can control what goes in them. Prefer they not be cooked with any alcohol? Done. Are you Vegan or Vegetarian? Food allergies? Then you gain total control of what is in that pot. Like bacon with your beans? No problem. So here’s A Cooking Primer for Beans.

The ingredients are simple: some dried beans, chicken stock, onions, garlic, bay leaves, bacon, and beer. What you get is sublime. And something you can eat all on its own. These beans, plus a slice of bread and another beer would make a fabulous dinner. And if you are Vegan/Vegetarian, omit the bacon and replace the chicken stock with vegetable stock and you are all set.

Grocery Store vs. Heirloom Beans

A word about beans. You can buy dried beans at the grocery store, of course. I used to just buy canned beans, but over the years I moved from canned beans to dry beans. And then, when someone showed me their beans, I started buying heirloom beans from Rancho Gordo. It turns out that these things make a difference. Canned beans, honestly, all taste the same, regardless of the type of bean. Black beans, pinto beans, white beans, pretty much all the same. The only real difference is the seasoning in the broth. Moving to dry beans and cooking them myself made a difference. But, like most other industrially farmed food, beans on the grocery store shelf are not very flavorful and lack in variety. That is not true of Rancho Gordo’s beans!

In the grocery store, you get a few different standard varieties of dry beans: Great White Northern, Pintos, Kidneys, perhaps a couple others. And that’s it. But if you are willing to put in a little time on the Internet and buy via a web store, you can find an amazing variety and type of beans out there. Like the Pinquitos in the above picture. Which have been cooked and eaten in Central California for at least a century, maybe longer, according to this article in the LA Times. There are hundreds of varieties of beans, most of which no longer end up in stores in the US. But I’ve had the opportunity to start eating them via Rancho Gordo, beans like Flageolets (France), Marcellas (Italy), Pinquitos (California), Yellow Eyes (Texas), Alubia Blancos (Mexico) and more. You should really try something other than the dry pintos on the grocery store shelf!

Notes and Tips: Soaking, Simmer, Salt

Most people used to cooking dry beans do a long soak of the beans before cooking them. This is, generally, because the dry beans are not “fresh”. Beans from someone like Rancho Gordo, that haven’t sat on shelves for over 2 years, are “fresh”. Soaking fresh beans can actually cause them to sprout. You should never soak Rancho Gordo beans. In fact, you don’t really need to overnight soak any beans. You can literally just cook the beans. But, if you are attached to soaking beans, and they are not “fresh” beans, then by all means feel free to soak them.

When I talk about a bare simmer with the lid cracked, what I mean is that you are getting no more than 2-4 bubbles per second. The easiest way I’ve found to achieve this is turn the burner down to its lowest setting and put a lid on, but cracked open. You may need to adjust the burner, based on your stove. It looks like the pictures below.

Finally, and I’m going to put a note in the recipe as well, do not add salt to this recipe. You can add after you have cooked if the beans/broth need more seasoning. But if you add salt at the beginning, you will create a mushy bean with a skin that tears and breaks easily.

Beans: A Cooking Primer

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Recipe by Eric Course: Main DishCuisine: American, BeansDifficulty: Moderate

Servings

4

servings

Prep time

20

minutes

Cooking time

3

hours 

30

minutes

Calories

272

kcal

Total time

3

hours 

50

minutes

A straight forward recipe for preparing and cooking dry beans. You can eat them as a dish by themselves, or use them in recipes that call for canned beans.

Ingredients

• 8 oz dry beans – either already soaked or fresh as above

• 1 small onion, diced

• 2 garlic cloves, minced or crushed

• 2 bay leaves

• 2 slices thick cut bacon

• 3 cups chicken stock

• 4 oz lager beer (and 8 oz for you to enjoy)

Method

• Put beans in a colander and rinse them with cold water. Sort and remove any debris or broken beans.
• In a 2 or 3 quart sauce pan, brown the bacon slowly until fat has rendered well, but the bacon is not yet crispy. Reserve the bacon, cut into small pieces.
• Add onion to bacon fat (add olive oil if needed) and saute until translucent, about 10 minutes
• Add garlic and bay leaves, cook until aromatic, about 1 minute
• Deglaze with the lager
• Add the beans to the pan and then cover with stock. Cover the beans by at least 1″
• Bring the beans to a hard boil for 5 minutes
• Turn heat down to low, cover with a cracked open lid, and cook at a bare simmer. Anything harder than this will break the skin on the beans as you cook them.
• Cook the beans for about 3 hours, adding water as needed to keep the beans submerged/covered.
• The beans are done when they have a clean bite, but are still firm to the touch. If you cook past this point they will start getting mushy.
  
• Take the beans off the heat ….. now you can serve as is, or you can add them to whatever you are cooking that needs beans at the point it would call for canned or cooked beans.

Notes

• Note: Do NOT add salt until after you have cooked the beans. Adding salt breaks down the bean prematurely, leading to a mushy bean with skin that tears and breaks.