Tinned beans are convenient and there is no shame in them. But cook a pot of dried beans once and the difference is obvious: they hold their shape, they taste of something, and the liquid they cook in is a light broth you would otherwise pay for.
Buy beans that are not ancient
Dried beans keep for years but do not cook well forever. Old beans stay hard no matter how long you boil them, and no amount of technique fixes it. Buy from somewhere with turnover, and if a pot refuses to soften after two hours, the beans are the problem, not you.
Soaking: useful, not compulsory
Soaking shortens cooking time and helps beans cook evenly. It does not make them taste better, and skipping it is fine if you have the time to cook them longer.
- Overnight soak. Cover with plenty of cold water and leave eight to twelve hours. They roughly double in size, so use more water than looks necessary.
- Quick soak. Bring to the boil, boil one minute, cover and leave off the heat for an hour.
- No soak. Add an hour or so to the cooking time and expect a slightly more broken result, which is ideal for soups and refried beans.
Soaking does reduce some of the oligosaccharides that cause wind, and discarding the soaking water removes more of them. If digestion is the issue, soak, drain and rinse.
Salt early, actually
The old advice was that salt toughens beans. Testing has moved on: salted water gives beans that are seasoned through and hold their skins better. Salt the cooking water like a light soup, about a teaspoon per litre, and taste as you go.
Acid is the ingredient to hold back. Tomatoes, vinegar and lemon slow softening considerably. Cook the beans first, add the acid once they are tender.
The pot
Cover the beans by about five centimetres of water. Add an onion halved, a few garlic cloves, a bay leaf and a strip of olive oil. Bring to the boil, then drop immediately to the barest simmer, with a lid slightly ajar.
A hard boil is the main cause of blown, broken beans: the movement knocks the skins off. You want the surface barely trembling. Top up with hot water if the level drops below the beans.
Knowing when they are done
Times vary with age, variety and water hardness, so taste rather than time. Cooked beans are creamy all the way through with no chalky centre, and the skin gives at the same moment as the inside. Try five beans, not one; there is always a stubborn outlier.
Rough guidance for soaked beans at a simmer: lentils need no soaking and take twenty to thirty minutes; black beans and pinto around an hour; chickpeas and cannellini an hour to an hour and a half; older or larger beans longer.
Keep the liquid
Bean broth, or aquafaba in the case of chickpeas, is the best part. It is lightly starchy and full of flavour. Use it to loosen a stew, cook rice, thin a soup, or as the base of a pan sauce. Chickpea liquid whips like egg white and makes a passable meringue if you are curious.
A pot is three meals
Cook a whole bag and plan around it.
- Day one: beans in their broth with olive oil, lemon, black pepper and bread. Almost a soup, entirely a dinner.
- Day two: drained and fried hard in a wide pan until crisp at the edges, with garlic and chilli, on rice or under a fried egg.
- Day three: blitzed with olive oil and lemon into a rough hummus, or folded into a stew with whatever vegetables need using.
Storage
Cooked beans keep four to five days in the fridge in their liquid, which stops them drying out, and freeze well for months. Freeze in the portions you actually cook with, liquid included. A container of home-cooked beans in the freezer is worth more on a Wednesday than almost anything else in there.