BEANS!

Beans, beans, the wonderful fruit... Ok, we love beans! Sure, its easy to buy a can of processed beans, but its not that difficult to make your own. We like to buy the bulk dry beans in the bins at our local grocery store, Winco (think CostCo/Sam's Club but not having to buy in bulk). All it takes to cook dry beans instead of canned beans is a little forethought. Below is our guide to cooking dry beans. Using dry beans instead of canned can create significant differences in the flavor of your favorite beany meals.


Tips and Tricks for cooking dry beans

• Plan your dry bean meals the night before. There is nothing worse than wanting to make chili but forgetting to soak the beans the night before
• We use a pressure cooker to cook our dry beans, instead of 1+ hour it only takes 10-20 minutes
• For soaking: 1 cup of dry beans requires 3 cups of water
• Large Mason or old (clean) condiment jars work great for soaking beans
• If you plan on using a pressure cooker, check your manual and soak beans with similar cook times in the same jar if you are using a variety of beans for your recipe (see our chili recipe). Any beans you soak together will need to be cooked together. You don't want a 1-3 minute bean with a 3-6 minute bean. Buuuut, if you are slow cooking something, like chili, and you forget to put like beans together, any beans that are under-cooked should finish cooking in the crockpot.
• When straining cooked beans from bean "juices," place strainer in large bowl if you want to save any juices for your recipe or if you want to use them for a stock for another meal. *I would not keep the juice for more than 1-2 days in the fridge.*
• Soaking beans overnight is fine. Soaking beans and forgetting them for a couple days will make your beans gross and smell like sulfur. Avoid soaking beans in direct sunlight.