Cooking Your Own Beans 🫘

There’s something so beautiful about preparing a large batch of cooked beans for the week. These are local dried navy beans. I soaked them for 7 hours before boiling for 2.5 hours or so. The key is to be gentle when cooking dried beans.

🛟 Save this note for a low maintenance way of making perfect beans 🫘.

Use any dried beans, white, black, etc. The method below will result in perfectly cooked beans, but do try to start with good beans that helps a lot.

How to:

I soak mine for 7 hours or overnight (covered with 2 or 3 inches of cold water). Carefully drain the beans and transfer (gently) into a 6 quart enameled dutch oven. Cover with water, about an inch or two, add an onion (cut in half), two garlic cloves, two peppercorns, two tablespoons of kosher salt, a bunch of cilantro, a pepper or two if you have any, cumin seeds, coriander seeds, and two bay leaves 🍃 and bring to a boil over medium high heat. Once at a boil, lower to a simmer and cook until tender or reached a desired texture. (You might need to add a cup or two of water if you evaporated too much.)

Pro Tips:

Be gentle! Don’t stir or agitate the beans too much. This is very important if you want to keep the beans intact as much as possible. We also don’t want to expose the beans to a rolling boil or at least not for too long!

To further enhance the flavor. Think fats, peppers, spices, herbs, cured meats, and so on!

Store:

Keep in fridge for up to a week. I use mine throughout the week for different meals and applications.