Soaking dried beans isn’t always necessary, since it saves little cooking time and can even diminish flavor in some varieties like black beans.Instead of soaking, a quick five- to 10-minute boil before simmering helps beans soften, removes lectins, and ensures even cooking.Properly storing beans in their cooking liquid keeps them flavorful and ready to use for up to a week in the refrigerator.
Conventional wisdom has long held that dried beans should be soaked before cooking. As the thinking went, soaking beans overnight in cold water helped them to cook faster, produced creamier interiors, and made them easier to digest. The problem: The time investment pretty much made a spontaneous pot of beans a nonstarter. If you found, say, a delicious-looking dried beans recipe that called for an overnight soak, well, you had to make it for dinner tomorrow night.
But in the past few years, chefs have rethought the soak, including Joe Yonan, author of Cool Beans: The Ultimate Guide to the World’s Most Versatile Plant-Based Protein.
“My basic feeling about soaking is it’s definitely not a requirement; you can just cook some beans,” says Yonan. “There are some reasons you may want to [soak], but what I didn’t realize until several years ago is there are good reasons not to.”
Why you can skip soaking (and the one bean you should never soak)
Yonan, who is the former food and dining editor at The Washington Post and now publishes a weekly newsletter called Eat at Joe’s, has spent years exploring and writing about plant-based cooking — so he’s cooked his fair share of beans.
“When it’s been studied, soaking maybe takes 15 minutes off the time, so it’s not that much of a time-saver,” he says. Soaking was a major deterrent to cooks, though. “When you think about what you are doing, the trade-off is that day-of planning, which was one of the big reasons why, up until a few years ago, people weren’t cooking beans that much. They were under the impression that if they didn’t soak them they couldn’t have them for dinner. That’s just not true.”
There is truth to the idea that soaking beans helps them cook more evenly. But Yonan explains that this is more relevant for older beans.
“I come to think of [soaking] like an insurance policy,” he explains. “If you don’t know how old your beans are, which is true for a lot of people, especially if you are buying in bulk or using a brand you never worked with before, soaking beans will make them behave like fresher beans.” But if your dried beans are under a year old, you likely don’t need to soak them.
And according to Yonan, no matter how old your black beans are, you shouldn’t soak them, which can negatively impact the final result. He explains that the beans you eat at Mexican restaurants are rarely soaked, and for good reason. “You end up with that purple color if you soak them, and you lose a significant amount of flavor,” he says.
Greg Dupree / Food Styling by Rishon Hanners / Prop Styling by Claire Spollen
Skip the soak and bring on the boil
If you’re cooking a brand or style of dried bean you’ve never made before, allow for trial and error, and make sure to taste your beans as they cook to test for doneness. There are multiple factors that contribute to the length of time it takes for a dried bean to cook until tender, from the age of the bean (the older the bean, the longer it takes to cook) to its size (bigger beans cook more slowly).
A good, non-soak insurance policy when it comes to cooking beans of any age is giving them a good boil before the long simmer. An initial boil of five to 10 minutes gets them primed and ready to soften, Yonan explains. Boiling also helps eliminate potentially harmful lectins, a protein found in beans that in high volumes can cause digestive issues. Soaking has traditionally been the method for removing lectins, but boiling and cooking properly also destroys them, he says.
How to cook dried beans to perfection
Yonan suggests picking through the beans to remove any debris or tiny stones, then adding them to a pot and covering with a few inches of water and about a tablespoon of kosher salt. (If you’re soaking your beans, Yonan suggests adding salt to the soaking liquid so you’re essentially brining the beans — the myth that this would lead to tough beans has also been debunked in recent years.)
“I add a whole yellow onion, maybe cut in half, but I leave the skin on and only cut off the hairy root end. I do the same with four to five cloves of garlic, a bay leaf or two, and a strip of kombu [which aids with digestibility and helps the beans soften quicker],” he says. You can also add dried chile peppers for a little spice.
Bring the pot to a full boil and let them cook for five to 10 minutes, then turn it down to a low simmer, cover, and cook until tender, which will take an hour or more depending on the bean. If your pot is oven-safe, you can put the pot in the oven and let them slowly cook for a few hours.
Joe Yonan, author of Cool Beans
“The best thing about cooking beans from dry is this beautiful second product, which is the bean cooking liquid. That’s the best place to store cooked beans.”
— Joe Yonan, author of Cool Beans
A slightly faster method is cooking the beans in a programmable electric pressure cooker like an Instant Pot. It takes slightly less time to cook beans in the Instant Pot compared to the stovetop, but Yonan recommends setting the appliance to simmer and letting the pot boil after it cooks to reduce and evaporate some of the bean cooking liquid.
Avoid the quick-soak method, which calls for pouring boiling water on dried beans and letting them soak for an hour before cooking. Yonan considers this method pointless. “What I find so ridiculous with this idea, you just lost an hour when you could have just been cooking the beans,” he says.
Whatever method you use, don’t dump the cooking liquid. “I think the bigger issue [than soaking] is probably what happens after you cook the beans,” Yonan says. “The best thing about cooking beans from dry is this beautiful second product, which is the bean cooking liquid. That’s the best place to store cooked beans.” It’s a delicious broth, whether you eat it with the beans or use it in another application.
Yonan places cooked beans in a mason jar and covers them with the cooking liquid, then refrigerates for up to a week.
Heed Yonan’s advice, and make a pot of beans for dinner tonight — yes, tonight.
Dining and Cooking