The Best Way To Cook Dried Beans Is Also One Of The Easiest

Beans are a hugely important part of our culinary world, serving as a staple ingredient for a wealth of cuisines. However, buying a bag of dried beans can be intimidating and lead to a tedious task in the kitchen. Cooking them on the stovetop takes time — an hour or longer. You can speed up the process by 10 or 15 minutes by soaking them for a few hours or the night before, but that still means additional planning. And if you get distracted and they boil dry, you end up losing your dinner, and probably wrecking a pan in the process. 

You can buy precooked cans of beans. There are even simple ways to make canned beans taste homemade. But dry beans cost half to one-third what canned beans do, depending on the type and brands you buy. Plus, dry beans give you ultimate control over factors like flavor and sodium content. If only there were a way to make dry beans as convenient as canned beans. The simple solution to all of this is a pressure cooker.

You can buy a much safer pressure cooker than the one your grandmother used without spending a whole lot, depending on how many bells and whistles you want. For example, you can get the baseline Instant Pot Duo 7-in-1 pressure cooker on Amazon for around $100. The most expensive model, the whisper-quiet Instant Pot Duo Plus 9-in-1 pressure cooker is still under $150.

The basic principles of cooking beans in the pressure cooker are comparatively similar to those for cooking them on the stovetop. But the pressure cooker has a couple of advantages. First, you don't have to soak beans overnight to pressure cook them. That means you can decide at the last minute that you want beans instead of having to wait for an overnight soak or use the so-called quick-soak method, which still requires an hourlong soak after a boil on the stovetop. Soaking beans provides distinct advantages, including making them cook faster, improving their texture, and making you less gassy afterward. But it only takes a couple of minutes in a pressure cooker.

A pressure cooker also cooks the beans in about half the time, depending on the type of bean you're cooking. But even if it only saves you 15 minutes, using a pressure cooker protects you from the dreaded words "stir occasionally." With a pressure cooker, you can set and forget, at least until the timer goes off.

Finding canned beans with the right flavor profile can be hard. Even if you find something passable, they're often still fairly bland, and their sodium content can be much higher than a lot of people would prefer. A pressure cooker gives you the perfect opportunity to make your beans the star of the show. Just as there are loads of powerhouse ingredients you can use to doctor up baked beans, there are many ingredients you can add to pressure cooker beans of all kinds to make them shine. 

Using the sauté function on your pressure cooker, you can cook off some onions and seasonings before you add the beans and water, and it makes getting the most flavorful beans extremely easy. Black beans can benefit from some garlic, red onion, bay leaves, and even some citrus, such as an orange. Or give chickpeas a little boost before turning them into hummus by adding some onion, garlic, and herbs like sage or rosemary. Ingredients like bacon, salt pork, and smoked ham hock are a classic choice, or add miso and paprika for a vegan take. However you enjoy your beans, the pressure cooker can help you make them more efficiently.