Salt, spices, and aromatics are the keys to flavorful beans.
Margaret Eby is currently the Deputy Food Director at The Philadelphia Inquirer, and has previously held a position as Senior Editor at MyRecipes, Food & Wine and Food52. Her work has also appeared in The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, New York Magazine and The New York Review of Books, and she has written two books. Red Powder Chili
We're in a boom time for beans, thanks to the Instant Pot and a heightened awareness of beans as a sustainable, affordable source of protein in a time of rapidly escalating climate change (and a growing number of plant-based eaters).
Once you have heirloom beans, you need to put in some work to make them not just edible, but tasty. It has come to my attention that it isn't necessarily common knowledge that vegetables and beans deserve to be seasoned just as effusively as a whole roast chicken or a cut of steak. If you boil some beans, without much in the way of salt or seasoning or anything else, they're not going to hurt you, but they're probably not going to be as delicious as they can be if you do a few really simple things to add flavor to them. There are times when you want beans to be relatively unseasoned — like when they're an ingredient in another dish — but if you want to eat beans, say, with a bowl of white rice, you'll have a lot more flavor if you add a few simple things as you simmer them.
These recipes, tips, tricks, and recommendations from our test kitchen are designed to help you harness the versatility and depth that these hardworking legumes bring to the table.
You really don't need to soak your beans. Really! It only cuts down on cooking time by about 20%, and that is time you could have been using to cook the beans anyway. But some people like to, and it can make beans cook up more evenly if you're unsure of how old they are. Unless you have heirloom beans with a harvest date on the package, who can tell how old beans are anyway? But if you know your beans aren’t fresh, soak them overnight or take them further with a brine.
Brine your beans while soaking them by adding a tablespoon or two of salt to the soaking liquid, a trick from Cool Beans author and bean guru Joe Yonan. It effectively brines the beans, making them both tastier and more evenly cooked as it helps to soften the beans’ skins, improving the final texture. Just note if you do that, cut down on the salt you add while they're cooking later.
Ham hock, bacon, or a bit of sausage are good options for building a foundation of flavor for beans. If it's sausage or bacon, you'll want to cook it through before adding it to the pot. Brown the meat in a bit of oil at the bottom of the pot to start, then remove it with a slotted spoon or spider and cook the aromatics in the meat fat. Add the meat back in when you put the beans and liquid into the pot. A ham hock is OK to just throw in with the beans whole, but you can get a bit more flavor out of it if you brown it first.
I usually keep my beans meat-free, so this is my normal weekly procedure. You've got your beans — half a pound or a pound is usually plenty, depending on how many folks you're feeding. You soaked them or you didn't, whatever. Now is a time to build a bunch of flavor before you even add beans to the pot. Heat up whatever vessel you're using for the beans with a glug of olive oil, or coconut oil, or a lump of butter or lard. Any fat will do! Then use it to cook some aromatics, which are, loosely, vegetables that can stand up to a lot of cooking and bring in some flavor when sweated down. If you cut up celery, carrots, and onions, well, friend, that is a classic French mirepoix, and it will do very nicely. It'll also disappear into the beans as it cooks, more or less, which is delicious. But other combinations of vegetables do very nicely, too, so you can adapt to what you have. The Cajun and Louisiana Creole combination of this vegetable base, usually called "the trinity," is onion, celery, and bell pepper. In Spanish, Italian, Latin American, and Portuguese cooking, this base often includes onions, peppers, tomatoes, and garlic, and it's called a sofrito.
All of these are great for cooking beans, but you don't have to adhere to anything super strictly. Use what you have. Mushrooms, sure! Leeks, absolutely! Ginger and lemongrass? Heck yes. Jarred salsa? Listen, I've done it. Just sweat the vegetables in the fat until they're no longer crunchy and are beginning to turn golden. These days, I prefer to just halve or quarter an onion, smash a couple whole cloves of garlic, and leave it there — I fish the onion out at the end, and the garlic cooks into the beans enough that it basically disappears.
Remember your old friend tomato paste? It's great to add into beans. Throw in a dollop or two to the aromatics once they've cooked, and sauté in the hot fat for a minute or two, just to cook out the tinny flavor. Harissa paste also works nicely for this.
Beans are an excellent canvas for using that spice mixture you picked up once on vacation and forgot to use. They take well to all manner of spices, including mixes like taco seasoning, garam masala, and Old Bay. I like smoked paprika to add a bit of the campfire flavor, since I keep my beans vegetarian most of the time. I also like adding a little bit of red chile flake or a whole dried chile, sometimes some cumin, and maybe a little bit of Mexican oregano. But there are no wrong answers here, just go slowly and don't dump in a whole canister of cumin in one go. Add a teaspoon or two of what you're working with, and you can always adjust the flavor later on.
I add my spices after my aromatics have sweated sufficiently, and cook them in the hot oil until they're fragrant, 30 seconds to a minute. Then I add in beans, cover the beans in an inch or two of water, and crank the heat until they come to a simmer. As for herbs, woody types like thyme, sage, and rosemary, are also great — add those in with the beans and water. I always add bay leaves at this stage, too, since they bring that herbaceous can't-put-your-finger-on-it flavor. I also add in a strip of kombu, a kind of Japanese kelp, which helps the beans cook more evenly. But don't stress; use what you have.
Water is perfectly good for cooking beans, but if you want extra flavor, why not add another liquid? You can cook beans in any kind of stock, for example, or any kind of combination of stock and water that you want. You can also add some wine or beer for more flavor. Just let it reduce for a few minutes to cook off some of the alcohol before adding the water and/or stock.
Seasoning is the cardinal rule of cooking anything, including beans. About a tablespoon of kosher salt per pound of beans is a good place to start if you're cooking them in water — remember as they simmer, the bean broth will concentrate and get saltier. If you're using stock, particularly the store-bought kind that's often fairly salty on its own, you should err on the more conservative side of seasoning. At the end of your cooking, taste the beans and adjust the salt as you like it.
Using acid when cooking dry beans does hinder the beans’ ability to soften appropriately, resulting in extended cooking times and an uneven, unpleasant texture. Add acidic ingredients, such as tomatoes, vinegar, or citrus, late in the cooking process, or use them as a post-cooking seasoning. (If using precooked or canned beans, you can go as heavy-handed with the acid as early as you’d like.)
OK, now you have your beans in the pot, with whatever combination of spices, vegetables, and whatnot you prefer. If you're cooking them on the stove, the thing to do, as per the guidance of Rancho Gordo's Steve Sando, is to raise the heat until it comes to a boil. Sando advises letting the beans boil for 15 minutes and then turning them down to a simmer. I usually walk away from the pot and come back to check on it to see that it's boiling, and then turn it down. Beans do not require precision! They are cool to chill out for a while. It's fine. Then you just simmer them until they're tender. Once they're done, store them in the liquid they were cooking with.
I tend to check on mine every half hour or so. Your bean cook time will vary, depending on the type of bean you use, your stove, and how old your beans are, but most beans should be done in one to three hours. Just be patient, and keep tasting them. If you're using a pressure cooker, that's cool too. Beans will usually take between 20 minutes and 45 minutes at high pressure — here's a handy chart. I tend to finish beans I cook in an Instant Pot by simmering them a bit at the end using the Saute function because it concentrates the bean broth flavor, and also because I'd rather have slightly undercooked beans and finish them with simmering than overcook them into total mush.
That's it! You're done. Taste the beans. If you want, add some freshly ground black pepper, or maybe a dash of hot sauce, or a squeeze of lemon. You could make a delicious chile sauce, or shower them with Parmesan, or stir in a lump of butter. You can eat them in a bowl with rice, sprinkled with green onions, or blend a cup or two with a half-cup of olive oil and add it back into the pot for an easy soup. You can eat them on toast with greens, or in pasta, or marinated in salad. There are dozens of bean recipes out there, and they'll all taste better now that you know not just how to cook them, but how to make them delicious.
The bean lover’s go-to source for years, Rancho Gordo stands the test of time as one of the best. Their beans are all heirloom and non-GMO. Plus, all of the beans they offer are less than two years old, with 95% of them being less than one year old.
Despaña Brand Foods offers some of Spain’s best dried and jarred beans. Since 1971, they’ve been working with small to midsize artisan producers in Spain to bring high-quality products to the United States.
One of the oldest suppliers of heirloom beans in the United States, Zürsun Idaho Heirloom Beans works with small family farms to grow most of their legumes in Idaho’s Snake River Canyon region. They process the beans from their raw state in-house.
Red Chile Pepper This story was originally published in June 2020.