Advice About Beans Is Simply All Wet

It’s heresy, but I’m here to tell you it’s time to rewrite your old recipes - at least the ones that start out “First, soak the beans.”

You don’t have to soak the beans, no matter what the package or the cookbook recipe says. In fact, you’ll end up with better beans - whole, intact beans, not mushy, broken beans - if you don’t soak them.

But doesn’t it take longer to cook them, skeptics will ask? Yes, but not nearly as long as it took you to soak your beans. From start to finish, it’s often quicker to cook them straight out of the package.

I haven’t soaked black beans for 15 years, since I took the advice of Mexican cooking expert Diana Kennedy, spelled out in her first book, “The Cuisines of Mexico.”

If you want the best-flavored beans, she wrote, don’t soak them. Just rinse and pick over them to remove any debris and cook them, covered, over low heat.

I decided to take my personal experiment beyond black beans and spent one morning testing the fledgling theory, cooking four batches of pinto beans.

One batch had been soaked overnight. Another was given the one-hour quick soak. A third wasn’t soaked at all.

And the fourth was a batch of old beans from 1992 (I always try to date dried products such as beans or wild rice because age does eventually affect cooking time).

The same amount of salt was added to all pots in the cooking.

Here are the results.

Overnight soak

These produced an initial scum on the surface. They were fully cooked in 30 to 40 minutes, but the skins were split and the liquid was an unappealing, starchy gray color. The beans were bleached in appearance.

Quick soak

Also produced scum initially, were fully cooked in 50 minutes. The liquid was grayish brown.

No soak

No scum on the surface. Beans cooked perfectly in 60 minutes. The beans retained a nice reddish brown appearance, as did the broth. The beans stayed whole instead of turning mushy and the flavor was deeper.

Old beans, unsoaked

Produced no scum. Cooked unevenly, but were finally all cooked in 1 hour 45 minutes.

If soaking doesn’t really save you any time, why do it? Well, some people may raise the issue of the digestive problems caused by beans. Experts say if you discard the soaking water, you diminish but don’t elminate the problem.

But let’s be honest. Even when beans are soaked, and the water discarded, they give some people problems. Better to try an alternative approach such as Beano.

Some people mistakenly add baking soda, but experts advise against it. Baking powder leaches out nutrients, and it doesn’t help prevent the digestive ferment that causes problems.