Pressure-cooked Beans

Dry beans are most conveniently pressure cooked.  What would take hours of conventional cooking is reduced to minutes in a pressure cooker.  Cook the beans with little or no flavoring. Once the beans are done, add seasonings and simmer for half an hour or less.

Baby lima beans, pressure cooked

Pre-soak dry beans in 4 times their volume of water for several hours before cooking.  That time can be shortened to an hour or two by heating the beans in their soaking water up to boiling, then taking them off the heat and allowing them to soak. If you throw out the soak water and replace with fresh water for cooking, the notorious flatulence problem is less, it is said (the indigestible sugars are water soluble.) Cooking water should be three times the volume of the soaked beans; i.e., 3 cups of water for each cup of beans.

In the pressure cooker, in addition to beans and water, you must add 2 Tb oil to prevent beans from foaming up into the steam vent.

I use a Pyrex 2-quart measuring cup for soaking beans.  Start with a pound of picked-over, rinsed dry beans, cover them with 5 or 6 cups of water,  and put them in a microwave oven until the water boils.   Let soak for a couple of hours at least - more is better.

When the beans are fully swollen, drain the soaking water and put them into a pressure cooker with fresh water.  Assemble the cooker and put it on medium heat.

When the valve rocker starts to rock, turn down the heat and allow cooking to continue for 10 minutes or so. (Look up the sort of beans you are cooking if you want to be sure.) Turn off the heat and allow the pot to cool down slowly.  When the pressure valve opens, you can open the pot.

Pressure cooking beans is absolutely the way to go but there is a certain art to the timing if you prefer your beans to be firm. It doesn't matter much to me because we always like beans better when they are cooked soft.  If you feel differently it's a good idea to read the directions!

Some directions will tell you that split peas and lentils should not be pressure cooked due to the foaming problem (it may clog the works, which can be dangerous.)  My Indian friends do pressure cook lentils, but I've noticed that Indian lentils are much smaller and faster-cooking than the American kind. Indian lentils should be on the heat only until the moment the valve rocker starts spitting, when you should immediately turn off the heat and allow the lentils to finish cooking on residual heat.

It's nice to have a container of cooked beans in the refrigerator.  There are so many uses for them.  A spoonful of beans is nice in soup, can be the protein, stick-to-the-ribs ingredient in a salad, and beans are a meal in themselves served over rice.

Here is a web page with charts showing everything you could ever want to know about pressure cooking times.  Pressure-Cooking Times & Instructions

Pressure cooked black beans, still steaming

 To see a full set of photographs showing how this dish was made, go to this set on flickr.   (It will open in a new tab or window; to return to this page, just close it.) The small pictures are thumbnails; click on each one to see it full-size, and to read the comments under it.  If you prefer to use the slideshow feature, you won't see the captions unless you click on "show info" (top right).