How! To! Cook! Beans!

The two most common ways to buy beans (and lentils and chickpeas) are canned and dried. You can usually substitude canned for dried, and vice versa. Dried beans are often cheaper than canned, but this might not be the case if certain kinds of canned beans are cheaper.

Beans contain lecthins, which are difficult to digest and can cause gas or discomfort after eating. Much of this post will be about getting rid of the lecthins.

Canned Beans

You can eat canned beans right out of the can. If beans don't give you gas, it'll be fine.

Beans are often cooked and canned without being soaked, which means the lecthins that cause gas and stomach upset end up in the liquid inside the can. You can make beans easier to digest by rinsing them before eating them. I like to use a collander or strainer, but you can also just remove the lid and use your hands to keep the beans from falling into the sink while you rinse them.

Taste a bean.

If it's crunchy and salty: I'm sorry. You might be able to soften the beans by boiling them for a long time, but because they're already salted it might not work.

If it's crunchy and not very salty: These beans are undercooked, but can be saved. Boil in new water (not the water from the can) and taste every 5 or 10 minutes until the beans taste good. If possible you'll want to cook them at a full boil - a slow cooker or rice cooker might not be hot enough.

If it's bland: It was probably canned without much salt. Boil in new water (not the water from the can) with about 1 tablespoon of salt per can of beans, for 10 minutes or until the beans taste good. After cooking, strain them to remove the extra salt.

Now you have edible and tasty beans! Put them in a recipe, or just eat them!

Dry Beans

With dry beans, you control the entire cooking process. The basic process is:

1. Soak the beans
2. Remove the soaking water
3. Cook the beans
4. Salt the beans

The details depend on which kind of beans you have.

Lentils, cowpeas (black eyed peas, field peas) and mung beans cook quickly and have low levels of lecthins, so soaking them is optional. If anyone you're cooking for has any difficulty with digesting beans, it's good to soak them anyway, even if only for an hour. Cooking time is less than half an our.

Chickpeas and most new world beans (black, red, white, pinto, etc) should be soaked for 8 hours or more (I think the real minimum is 5, but I always soak overnight). You can cook them in 1 to 3 hours at a full boil, or for a longer period of time at a slightly lower tempurature using a slow cooker.

Kidney beans have really high levels of lecthins. They need to be soaked for 8 hours, and cooked on the stove at a full boil for 1 to 3 hours.

Fava beans have skins that taste bad. You'll want to remove the skins after soaking them and before cooking. I've never cooked them because I didn't want to deal with it. The internet says that after soaking and removing the skins, they're a fast cooking bean (under 30 minutes).