The Laments of Lost and Sour Beans

Two in one this week, on a topic close to my heart.

Dear Tamar,

I’m trying to eat more beans (fiber! protein! longevity!) but struggling with how to transform them from their dried form to something I want to eat. I’ve tried different combinations of instant pots, bay leaves and salt, but I’m feeling myself give up on a long life. What are the secrets (or well known culinary steps) to making beans that taste good, decadent even?

-Lost Bean

and…

Dear Tamar,

I love to cook beans from dried. In theory I love to do this in the Instant Pot my mother gave me. But often, I find that they come out with an acrid, unpleasant tang that, to me, ruins the batch. It’s true even if I add in aromatics and use broth. No amount of lemon or olive oil at the end really masks it. It is making bean explorations less fun, as I live in a very hot place and I don’t want to stand over a simmering pot or turn on the oven for hours! Am I the only one that notices this off flavor? Is there something about the temperature or pressure of the instant pot that is preventing the breakdown of some unpleasant chemical?

-Sour Bean

Dear Lost and Sour Beans,

I’ve grouped your letters together because your pleas are similar: Please help me make better beans! I’ve also combined them because I’m slightly mystified by both. “Crunchy” beans I’ve got covered. “Tasteless” beans, too. But “meh” beans and “acrid” beans both hover somewhere just beyond the veil of my experience.

I wonder: Do I have unusually anodyne taste in beans? Am I content with a finished dish that my correspondents would find untenably mediocre? It’s one of the most pleasurable parts of writing this column that I can never know. I’m forced to solve an equation some of whose variables will remain forever unfixed.

Let’s break down the stages of bean cooking:

1. Soak dried beans. Some bean aficionados claim they don’t soak, or don’t soak certain beans. Rancho Gordo sells “new crop” beans—beans that have been harvested and dried the same year they’re sold. This means you can get away with a shorter soak, or with a “quick soak,” which I’ll describe in a minute. But the best way to insure a successful start is to pour beans into a pot and cover them with water by several inches on the night before you plan to serve them. A number of respected cooks add salt to the water during the soak. I don’t, out of habit. Whether you salt or don’t, soak beans at night, and cook them the next morning—or afternoon. If you forget: put the beans in a pot, cover then with water by several inches, bring them to a boil, then cover the pot, turn off the burner, and let them sit for an hour or two. That is a “quick soak.”

2. Either drain the beans, or simply place the pot containing them on the stove. I used to be a strict water-switcher. After hearing that Harold McGee himself, father of food science, does not switch his water, I stopped. It’s easier not to, and I love things being easy. Turn on the burner under the pot, add a bay leaf, a garlic clove, herb stems if you have, a piece of onion or onion skins, any mushroom stems or carrot nubs you’ve collected, and salt. How much? Start with a tablespoon and then, once it has dissolved, taste the water. The water should taste good, almost like the most basic broth. You should instinctively want another spoonful; if you don’t, slowly add salt until you do.

3. Add 1/4 teaspoon of baking soda. This is a hack. I support it completely. Baking soda speeds the breakdown of pectin in beans’ skins, softening them more quickly. 1/4 teaspoon is a very specific amount. It’s enough that the baking soda does its work, and not so much that you can taste the baking soda; at much more than 1/4 teaspoon, the beans and bean broth begin to taste metallic.

4. Once the pot comes to a boil, skim the scum off its top, if you want. I’ve addressed this issue before, in a response to “Bean Wondering.” I wrote that: “the scum is the result of saponins—soap-ish, harmless, bubbling compounds—in beans. If you ever cook with canned beans, you’ve seen saponins in their fullest expression while rinsing the beans and watching a layer of suds arise, before subsiding. The same thing is happening in your pot, with bits of plant protein, released in cooking, inspiring the saponins to cohere into a raft.” If you want to skim, skim; if you want to ignore, ignore.

5. Turn the pot down to a low simmer. Add a lot of olive oil. I don’t know the quantity of beans you’re cooking, but add at least a quarter cup and probably more. Make sure the olive oil isn’t rancid before adding it by smelling it, and then if you’re not sure, tasting it.

6. Let the beans cook at the lowest possible simmer until 5 taste perfectly tender. If you remove 5 from the pot and 4 are tender and the last still slightly resistant, cook the beans until the next time you try, you get a straight 5.

The next stage is how you will eat/serve the beans. If you’ve followed my instructions above, your beans are what I consider delicious. They are seasoned—with herbs and garlic and salt and olive oil—and so tender that they seem luxurious. But if you want to add something to them, now that they’re cooked and seasoned is the time to start. Here are some ideas:

1. Make white rice. Top each bowl with several ladlesful of beans and a big spoonful of Sichuan chili crisp.

2. Buy or make tortillas. Serve beans topped with finely sliced scallion and cilantro for bean tacos.

3. Make a bean salad by scooping out beans and leaving their broth behind. Open several cans of good, olive-oil-packed tuna. Cut several tomatoes into large cubes. Remove the pits from several oil-cured olives. Slice scallions. In a large bowl, mix the beans and scallions. Add a drizzle of red wine vinegar and a pour of olive oil. Arrange on a plate, add the tomatoes, salting them well, and the tuna, in large flakes. Scatter the olives around. Enjoy. Make any variation on this you want.

4. Turn your bean broth-with-some-beans-left into minestra by starting a new pot with sofrito—onions, carrot, celery or fennel and a little tomato paste—then adding chopped kale, potatoes, and any other vegetables you want, and a combination of bean broth and water, and simmering it until it’s delicious.

There are dozens of other things you can do, but those four should be enough to last you a while. The only remaining issue is the chance that Sour Bean has been following those exact steps and still ending up with off-tasting, acrid beans. The solution I’ve encountered for this is to remove the silicon seal on your Instant Pot, wash it well, and then replace it and try again. Apparently, these seals have caused hopeful bean cookers all kinds of problems, most resolvable—as so many things are—by a thorough cleaning.

Dear cooks, I admit some reservations at leaving it there. I’ve published all of those steps before, and perhaps you’ve read them before, and hoped that time had borne more fruit—that I had new, better wisdom to offer. I hope you, Lost Bean, feel less lost. I hope the sour taste is gone from your mouth, Sour Bean. I hope that you won’t consider me, giving a version of the same advice, again and again, over years, a has-bean…