Twenty minute dry beans

Barb LeeContributor - July 26, 2021

Dry beans are a really important staple in food storage, but preparing them is really fuel and water intensive.  Over time, I’ve been experimenting with making “quick cook” dry beans, based on this blog post: https://seedtopantryschool.com/dehydrating-beans-make-quick-cook-beans/ I’ve noted she’s made some revisions to the instructions I read some years ago.  Lots of pictures and explanations in the article.

Anyway, I’m in the midst of a dehydrating frenzy, with the unit going nearly every day, and this week I’m preparing a stash of dry beans for quick cooking. So nice to use the cooking resources when they are plentiful!

The basics:  Soak dry beans 8-12 hours, or use the “quick soak” method. Rinse the beans, cover with fresh water, bring to a boil and boil ten minutes.  Drain and rinse.

Dehydrating is “tricky” unless you don’t mind bean crumbles.  This method prepares the beans so they remain intact, and make nice additions to soups, etc.

Dry the soaked and rinsed beans for about 5 hours at the lowest setting.  The article says 95 deg F, my unit doesn’t go lower than 105 and that worked.  At higher heat, apparently the quick-drying skin will “curl” the softened inner bean and cause it to split and crumble. The lower temp seems to “set” the inner bean and make it more crumble resistant.

After about 5 hours, I went ahead and cranked the heat up to 125 and dried the pinto beans hard.  They are almost 100% intact and virtually look like raw dry beans. This morning I rehydrated by pouring a normal cooking amount of boiling water over them and left them to soak a couple of hours.  Then without draining, I brought the beans to a boil, then reduced to simmer.  They were al dente within 10 minutes, and mash-able within 20.  Tacos and refrieds tonight! I’m about to vacuum seal the rest, and I expect to have “20 minute pinto beans” in storage for years to come.

Currently I’m drying great northern and navy beans.  I have a great recipe for bean soup that uses mashed potatoes as a thickener. 

7  

Cooking your own dry beans is so much cheaper and shelf stable than buying cans of ready to go beans. It does take some planning of your meals because you aren’t going to be able to hydrate the beans an hour before you start making your tacos.

What I like to do is to cook up a batch of beans and then freeze the extra. If you don’t plan out your entire day, you just need to thaw out those already cooked beans and place them in your meal. Much faster than cooking from scratch.

Thank you for the recommendations on how to speed up this process. I’m going to play around with your strategy.

 

Has anyone tried the following method?

https://www.frugalandthriving.com.au/the-quickest-and-easiest-way-to-cook-dried-beans-and-its-not-in-the-pressure-cooker/

Kinda slow but very little fuel usage. I’m tempted but never got around to trying it. 

 

Last year Josh with The Prepared released a blog post titled Surprise! The dry beans you stockpiled are a pain to cook. Use these tips, tricks, & best practices. Hopefully that will lead into some more bean cookin discussions! 🙂

 

I’ve actually had mixed experience with the “quick cooking bean” method that I posted.  I made some refried beans with pintos and they really did cook quickly.  But then I made a pot of bean soup with prepared white beans and it took hours to soften the beans. I have a couple of books by LDS members that are very big on beans in food storage, and their take is to basically grind the beans up, then you can put them in almost any recipe or cook them separately very quickly.  I’ll look at that more closely.

 

That’s very interesting. I look forward to hearing more on what you learn and find out.

 

I’m not going to use this parboiling/dehydrating method again.  I wanted to use the beans in a pot of chili today (pretty much all dehydrated ingredients).  I thought I should cook the beans first, instead of just chucking them in the pot with everything else and that was a good decision.  The beans took a lot of water and needed at least 20 minutes to cook after bringing to a boil, still al dente.  Added way too much time/resources to my “instant” chili.  Canned beans will be better.

 

Thanks for the update! Good thing you are trying out various methods now.