How to cook a pot of beans

A pot of beans, cooking on the stove, with green onions, garlic and bay leaves.

Beans are awesome. They're cheap, healthy and delicious. I make a pot every week.

Every week? Yeah, pretty much. But isn't that boring? It could be. But I am definitely not the kind of person who is satisfied eating the same thing all week. I don't do boring.

My plan is always to first cook a simple pot of beans, and later, use those beans in at least a couple different ways. They might be roasted for a snack, tossed in a salad, or cooked a second time with other stuff for a tasty pot of soup.

Anyway, most recipes I'll be posting here on Bean Tips will start with something like “First, cook a pot of beans.” So, let's get that out of the way!

Ingredients

  • 1 pound of dried beans, any type (navy, red, Lima, chickpeas, whatever)
  • 14 grams salt
  • 3 cloves of garlic, unpeeled
  • 3 green onions, trimmed
  • 2 bay leaves

Tools

  • Colander
  • Pot, largeish, with a lid (smaller than a pot you'd cook spaghetti in, but larger than one you'd use to warm up a jar of spaghetti sauce)
  • Scale
  • Stove and/or oven
  • Kettle (optional)

Steps

Rinse and pick

Beans can be dusty. And sometimes, you'll find little rocks, twigs or balls of dirt. (I've found gobs of rocks in bags of even the fanciest beans.) So dump your bag into a colander and give them a good rinse. Then slowly pour the clean beans into an empty pot, watching closely for debris.

Add water and salt

Cover the beans with water. How much? It doesn't really matter, as long as it's enough to top the beans by two inches or so. More is fine. The exact quantity will vary depending on the size and shape of your pot.

Put your pot on the stove and turn the heat to medium-high. Again, the exact temperature doesn't matter so much as long as it's hot enough to get that water boiling soonish. But I usually don't crank it up to the max.

Measure your salt, by weight. After much testing, I've landed on 14 grams of salt per pound of beans. Some folks like 'em saltier, but 14 grams is the sweet spot for me. Toss the salt in, give the beans a stir to make sure none are stuck to the bottom of the pot, and cover with a lid until it boils.

Why by weight? Why not teaspoons? Because different salts have different densities. A teaspoon of your salt might weigh twice as much as a teaspoon of mine. (And thus, be twice as salty! Ick!)

Okay fine but I've heard that you shouldn't salt beans until the end. Yes, I've heard that too and it's bullshit. Beans are much, much tastier cooked with salt, from the get go.

And didn't you skip the soak? Soaking your beans isn't bullshit, but I rarely do it. More on soaking below, under the heading “Done”.

Prepare your other ingredients

Now that your beans are on the stove, you've got a little time to kill before they boil. This is when I get everything else ready. Trim the roots and any wilted bits from your green onions. Grab a couple bay leaves and a couple cloves of garlic, but leave the skins on.

Boil hard, then simmer

Once the water reaches a boil, uncover the beans and let boil, hard, for five minutes or so. Set a timer. Honestly, I have no idea if this step is necessary but I always do it because Steve at Rancho Gordo thinks it's important, and it's simple enough.

When your timer goes off, toss in the garlic, onions and bay. We are now at a crossroads. I used to simmer my beans on the stove. Nowadays, I just chuck them into the oven.

Option one: Stovetop

After you've added your garlic, etc., partially cover the pot with a lid, and reduce the heat so that the water is at a bare simmer. Like, it's bubbling, but just a tiny bit. This will take some practice, but after a few pots, you'll know the right notch. Check the pot occasionally and if you're running low on water, top it off with boiling water from your kettle. (If you use tap water here, your pot will cool down and stop simmering and then you've gotta get it back to a perfect simmer and that can be crazy making.)

Option two: Oven

My go-to these days is the oven. Set it to 250F. After you've added your garlic, etc., cover the pot with a lid and just toss it into the oven. (Or, if you're like me and you've got something else in the oven for Sunday dinner, don't worry too much about the temperature. Your beans will be perfectly happy sitting next to your carnitas at 275F, or mac and cheese at 350F.)

Regardless of if you use the oven or the stove, don't stir those beans too often! I don't stir them at all if they're in the oven, where the heat is coming from all around the pot. On the stove, where the heat is coming from below, I stir occasionally until they're getting close to done, at which point I stop, to avoid breaking the beans apart.

Done

After a few hours or so, your beans will be cooked. C'mon, “a few hours or so?” How long, really? I honestly can't say. It depends on the type and size and shape of beans you're cooking, but more than everything else, it depends on the age of the beans. If you're buying from a grocer who sells a lot of beans, they're probably pretty fresh. Beans that have been sitting on the shelf — or the back of your pantry — for a couple years might take twice as long to cook.

That's where soaking is helpful. Got a bag of beans that you suspect might be old? Rinse and pick them, cover with water, and leave your pot on the counter overnight. Then in the morning, put the pot on the stove, add salt, and continue with the recipe.

So how do I know the beans are done? I aim to cook my beans so that they are completely soft, but not falling to pieces. Taste them. Are they the least bit gritty? Back in the oven. Different beans have different textures — a chickpea will be more toothsome than a butter bean — but in general, I'm trying to cook a pot of little beany pillows. Soft, with the skin just barely holding the package together.

Gently remove your garlic, etc., and you're done!

After they're done

Now that you've got a hot pot of perfectly cooked beans in their broth, what to do?

Keep warm

If you're gonna have your beans for dinner, and you've got some time until then, set your stove/oven to it's keep-warm setting, and leave the beans until it's time to eat.

Cool

Let the pot cool down on the countertop and put the beans — still immersed in their cooking liquid — into the fridge. Beans keep best in their broth! (The skin will peel back from hot beans if you drain them too quickly.)

What if I just want the beans, but not the broth? Sure, just let 'em cool down first. Then drain them, but keep that broth! I'll post recipes here soon enough, but bean broth is an excellent substitute for water when cooking rice, or a delicious base for a pot of soup!

Freeze

Beans freeze great in their broth! After they're cool, transfer to a freezer bag, deli tub, Cambro, whatever, and stash 'em away for another day. It's always nice to discover a half-batch of beans in the freezer when I'm short on time.

What's next?

So, like I said at the start, I do this pretty much every week. Sunday night we'll eat the beans simply prepared, as above, then later in the week, I'll turn the leftovers into a variety of dishes, using both the beans and their broth.

I'll be posting recipes for your cooked beans here, soon! Plus recommendations on cookbooks, tools, and we might even talk about farts. (We will definitely talk about farts.)

In the meantime, if you've got any bean questions you'd like answered, drop me a line at brian@beantips.com, and sign up to get Bean Tips in your inbox and be the first to know!💨