If you've been following along this past month, you know that we love beans. We also love our slow-cooker. Lucky for us, it just so happens that beans and slow-cookers make excellent friends! Here's how it works...
As Faith has described, beans cook best over a low, steady heat. This lets them absorb liquid evenly and prevents the skins from splitting. Low, steady heat? Sounds like a job for the slow-cooker!
We also like cooking beans in the slow cooker because it lets us cook several pounds of dry beans at once. We set aside what we need right away and freeze the rest for later.
Slow-Cooker Beans
1 16-oz bag of dried beans (or more, if desired)
Water
2 teaspoons salt (per 16-oz bag)
If desired, soak beans overnight in plenty of cool water. Opinions vary, but we have found this decreases some of our digestion issues.
In the morning, drain and rinse the beans. Discard any beans that floated to the top of the water or look otherwise unsavory.
Pour the beans to your slow cooker. If using more than one bag, be sure that you leave a few inches of clearance at the top of your slow cooker. Add a teaspoon of salt and enough fresh water so the beans are covered by an inch or two. Cover and set the slow cooker for 8 hours.
At the 4 hour mark, add another teaspoon of salt, stir the beans, and eat a few to see how far the beans have cooked. Continue checking every half hour or so, and stop cooking when the beans have reached your desired doneness. We don't usually cook the beans for the full 8 hours unless we're doing a mashed bean recipe, but we like the temperature range on the 8-hour setting for keeping the beans at a low simmer.
After cooking several batches, we have a good idea of when the beans will be done and no longer check doneness every half hour unless we're cooking a new kind of bean. In our slow cooker, we've found that 5 hours is ideal for al dente beans destined for soups (where they will continue cooking a bit), 6 hours is good for ready-to-eat beans, and 7 hours gives us very soft beans.
Any other tips for cooking beans in the slow cooker?
Related: How to Convert Dutch Oven Recipes to the Slow Cooker
(Image: Emma Christensen for the Kitchn; Crock-Pot)
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Comments (20)
Another great reason for me to get a crock pot!
I've actually done soaked beans partway in my rice cooker when I needed to cut down the time for other recipes like chili I was going to start when I got home from work. Dried beans soaked in water overnight, then turn on the rice cooker in the morning when I get up and off again before I leave. Definitely not the volume of a good slow cooker, but I don't have that kind of space in my cabinets or my freezer anyway.
This is embarrasing but I have spoiled three lovely bags of Rancho Gordo beans. I cook them as slow as I can but they all split and never come out soft no matter how long I cook them. I hope this crock pot method works.
But I thought salt isn't to be added until the end... I assume it is different for this method?
I plan on making some cranberry/borlotti beans on Saturday so I may try this method. Question: at what point would I want to add any savory flavorings such as onions, carrots and other seasonings.
A safety tip: don't do this with kidney beans, as they need to be cooked at a full boil for at least 10 minutes, and a crockpot on low may not reach that temp.
I never add salt to the beans till the end (or till they're as soft as I want them.) Salt can make them tough. I've added other seasonings as soon as I put them in, though.
You could always boil kidney beans on the stove and then transfer them to the slow cooker. But - safety tip, Julie? Please elaborate.
I think you can really add salt at any point. From what I gather from Faith's posts and others I've read, salt helps keep the skins from splitting and also helps the beans remain whole instead of getting mushy. Before, during, or after - you'll still have good beans!
Rosebud, if you're not planning on draining off the liquor, I'd add the seasonings about halfway through. If you want to drain the liquor, you can add some spices during cooking so the beans get seasoned throughout and then combine everything (along with more spices to taste) after draining.
And yes, I'm curious about safe kidney beans, too!
I usually cook beans with some kind of smoked meat. Will this method work with this as well?
mmmm, one of my favorite meals is a big bowl of soup beans and a side of cornbread. Soup beans= pintos, navy beans or Great Northerns cooked with a ham hock or some other piece of smoked meat (and water of course). I find it much easier to cook them in the crockpot rather than on the stovetop. Its a perfect meal to come home to after a long day at school/work. Yum!
About the kidney beans...They contain a substance called phytohemagglutinin. It's neutralized by boiling, but not by sub-boiling temps. If you eat raw or undercooked red kidney beans, you will be in for serious gastrointestinal trouble for the rest of the day, though it won't kill you. White kidney beans don't have as much phytohemagglutinin, but it's still a good idea to make sure they come to a boil.
Lately I've been fine with soaking my beans for a while then letting them simmer away, but I might have to give this a try. The husband is home all day anyway, so he can monitor the done-ness.
Thanks Julie... good to know. It doesn't sound like fun.
And Mow, yeah, I cook them with a ham hock too, just throw it all in at the beginning. In fact, Successful Launch Beans are tailored to just that, because who has time to add salt halfway through when you've got a shuttle to launch?
Launch Beans also have salt at the beginning, and I've never had them get tough... but other types of beans have. I wonder if it's the kind of bean or if I just didn't cook the others long enough. Hmm.
slow cooked beans are good, but pressure cooking them is a good way too. It's the only way I do my black beans and is just as easy but a bit faster. I will admit to being a bit freaked out with the pressure cooker and the rocking the first time i used it
Would this be for cooking at low or high in the older style crockpots?
I agree with adding the salt towards the end, because salt tends to harden the beans. And usually the beans take forever to get soft, and it sucks.:/ but yeah i usually add like garlic and anything else i want to add at the beginning, but the salt towards the end when there almost ready.
What about mixed beans?
There's 13 different types of beans in Bob's Red Mill's mix.. after overnight soaking, can it be cooked in a crock-pot?
If not, cooking on a stovetop for a few hours would still be problematic due to the different beans, no?
We have a large family(8) and we love to cook our beans -at least three pounds dry- in the Slow Cooker - usually pintos, but also soup beans and multi-bean mixes. Our practice is to soak the beans in the crock of the cooker overnight WITH SALT & SPICES (garlic powder, marjoram, and ground red pepper/cayenne). This helps the beans rehydrate with the flavors permeating the beans - a "self-marinade" for beans. Bean liquor is drained (I reserve up to 4 cups for adding if needed during the cooking) and floaters are discarded next morning.
Add enough fresh water to cover (2 inches over if I won't be home to check), add ham, a little minced onion, and cook! If there is not enough "soup" during cooking, I had a little of the reserved bean liquor.
We run all day on low - about 9 hours OR set on high for 5 hours - for soft centers with unbroken skins.
If the kids get home from school before the parental workday ends, they have to remember to save a few bowls for us!
Delicious!
Special Note: I omit the salt during presoak if I plan to use saltpork instead of ham. Also, make sure to remove the rind & rinse the saltpork well or your beans might be too salty.
I like to have some beans cooked in advance, yet freezer space is limited. So, I pressure cook and can beans at the same time. It's really simple: 3/4 cup of dried beans per pint canning jar, soak overnight, throw out soaking water and top up with boiling water, pressure can at 10 lbs. for 75 minutes.
This method does tend to cook the bejezus out of the beans, so I only use it when the final product calls for very soft beans (great for purees, burritos, "creamier" bean soups).
Beans, ready when you need 'em for a fraction of the price of commercially canned beans, and NO salt!
Thekitchn.com strikes again!! Everytime I need a recipe I come here. Even just now, I did a google search for slowcooker beans basics and this came up! I don't know why I ever bother going to any other website. Thekitchn has it all! Thanks for the tips on cooking beans in a slowcooker.
Regarding the salt early or not question: I have a Cooks Illustrated page taped to my cabinet (Mar/apr 2010) that says: "Dried Beans: Brine 'Em! Forget conventional wisdom warning against salting beans before they're cooked. Our testing revealed that adding salt to the overnight soaking (2 tsp/qt water) - in effect "brining" the beans - yields better-seasoned and more evenly cooked results. "