How to Cook Dried Beans: Recipe Demo with White Beans

Learn how to cook dried beans with two methods by Mark Bittman & Deborah Madison. You'll also learn how to salt beans when cooking them. Cooking dried beans lets you flavor your beans how you like them. I'm using Great Northern Beans, but you can use this method for any of them. I find that white beans, like Navy, small white beans, or Great Northern beans have the best flavor and are easiest to use in most recipes. Mark Bittman's process was the best for how to cook al dente beans. Get extra notes at cookingcompaniontv.com/beans

Chapters
0:00 Intro
0:33 Boiling Method from Deborah Madison
1:18 When to Add Salt to Dried Beans
1:49 Mark Bittman Method of Cooking Dried Beans
2:16 Which is the Best Way to Cook Dried Beans

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HOW TO COOK DRIED BEANS
from Deborah Madison’s "The New Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone"
Ingredients:
1 cup beans, cleaned, rinsed, and soaked
2 bay leaves
1 small onion, quartered
several parsley sprigs
1 large clove garlic, sliced
1 teaspoon olive oil
1 piece kombu or pinch asafetida, optional
1.5 teaspoons sea salt

Drain your soaked beans and cover them with 6 cups of fresh water and bring to a boil. Boil, uncovered for 10 minutes. Skim off any foam. Lower the heat, and add bay leaves, garlic, olive oil, onion, and parsley. Also, if you have kombu seaweed, add a 6-inch piece to the pot. Do - not - add - any - salt - yet.

Let this simmer until the beans are partially tender which could be 30 minutes to an hour. It depends on how old or fresh your beans are. So taste a bean, check out the tenderness and NOW add salt and continue cooking until the beans are tender but not mushy.

Let them cool in the broth. Once your beans reach the tender-but-not-mushy state, do the same thing - turn off the heat and let them cool in their broth.
Remove all the other ingredients, reserve the broth if you want, and use the beans however you like!

Mark Bittman’s method from "How to Cook Everything Vegetarian" takes a little longer but needs less attention, so it may be easier.

Put the beans in a large pot with a tight-fitting lid and cover with cold water by 2 to 3 inches. Bring to a boil and boil the beans, uncovered, for about 2 minutes. Cover the pot and turn off the heat. Let the beans soak for about 2 hours.

Taste a bean. If it's tender (it won't be done), add a large pinch of salt and several grinds of black pepper and make sure the beans are covered with about an inch of the soaking water. (If not, add a little water.) If the beans are still raw, don't add salt yet and cover with about 2 inches of water.

Bring the pot to a boil, then reduce the heat so that the beans bubble gently. Partially cover and cook, stirring occasionally, checking the beans for doneness every 10 or 15 minutes, and adding a little more water if necessary. If you haven't added salt yet, add it when the beans are just turning tender. Stop cooking when the beans are done the way you like them, taste and adjust the seasoning, and use immediately or store. You can add aromatics to the beans in this method, just like the first method demoed.

Between these two methods, I found that my beans very quickly reached nearly mushy with the first method, so I immediately used them in a cold salad. The second method, where they sat in hot water for 2 hours, left them a little al dente, which is also fine for salads and even better for cooking them into another dish.

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I'm Jenna Edwards, a food enthusiast and certified Integrative Nutrition Health Coach. Most importantly, I love food and the cultures and traditions around it. I help people eat more vegetables through my cooking companion videos. My goal is to make you feel more comfortable cooking, so I show you not only how a recipe works and looks, but I give techniques and suggestions for making it easy on beginner cooks.

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