Cooking Dry Beans Faster and Other Tips for Softening Beans

Like many of you, my time is limited.  There is always more to do than can be accomplished in any given day.   And yet, everyone in the family still expects to have dinner on the table every night.

One of the great time and money savers for me is pressure canning dry beans.  The beans are perfectly cooked, and I get enough in each canning load for seven meals.  When it's time for dinner, it's a simple matter to open a jar, heat, and mash, if necessary.  (We eat a lot of refried beans here, so beans get mashed more often than not.)

Circumstances associated with COVID prompted an awful lot of people to start buying beans, among other things.  And before this point, quite a number of these people hadn't spent much time preparing beans.  Reports around the blogosphere attest to the challenges they face.  Improper storage of these panic-purchased beans will give rise to difficulties in the future when it's time to eat them, which is the current experience of many others who have stored beans for years.

How can you get old beans to soften faster and cook more quickly?  What exactly happens to make these beans so hard?

Beans are dried down to 16% water content when they are sold to wholesalers, and this moisture level continues to drop.  The surface of dry beans has pores called micropyles.  As the beans dry down, more moisture is lost and the openings of the micropyles shrink.  (If the beans dry so much that the micropyles shrink closed, those beans will never soften.  The only solution is to grind them into flour.)  Then when it is time to cook the beans, it takes longer for the beans to absorb water through the micropyles and soften.[1] 

Fortunately, we have a few tricks we can employ to hasten cooking and softening.  The first involves brining the beans, which is exactly what it sounds like:  the beans are soaked in salted water.  "Ah," you say, "I've always heard that adding salt to beans will lengthen the time it takes to cook."  And that is true.  However, brining beans in salted water is not the same as cooking beans in salted water.  The following explanation of the brining process comes from Dr. Guy Crosby, science editor of America's Test Kitchen  and author of The Science of Good Cooking.

Brining beans involves the same process as soaking in plain water except the brine contains a low concentration of salt (sodium chloride). During brining the sodium ions slowly exchange with calcium ions that are part of a very large molecule called pectin. Pectin strengthens the cell walls in the beans, and calcium strengthens pectin. So natural pectin can produce skins on the outside of dry beans that are difficult to soften and expand, and can eventually burst when the inside of the beans become over-cooked. Exchanging sodium for calcium ions during brining weakens the pectin so the skins become more flexible and can expand without bursting as the interiors to cook to a soft creamy interior.[2]

For each pound of beans, dissolve 3 tablespoons of salt in 1 gallon of water.  Soak the beans for 8-24 hours, and then drain.  And not to worry:  the sodium only penetrates partway to soften the skin.  The beans are not going to be salty in the least.[3]   An added bonus of brining the beans is that the skins do not burst while cooking.

A second tip for cooking and softening beans faster is to add a little baking soda to the cooking water, about 1 teaspoon per cup of beans.  The baking soda alkalinizes the water and helps weaken the pectin in the walls of the beans so that they absorb water and soften more quickly.  Beans to which baking soda is added to the water cook in about half the time.[4] Unfortunately, adding baking soda to the cooking water will damage thiamine.  In a situation where vitamins really count, you'll have to weigh whether the advantage of cooking beans faster outweighs the loss of thiamine.  Consider other options for softening old, hard beans before resorting to baking soda. 
 
Links to related posts:
Refried Beans
Beans--Basic Food Storage

References:
[1] https://beaninstitute.com/cooking-with-dry-beans-food-science-insights-and-strategies-from-dr-guy-crosby/
[2] Ibid.
[3] https://www.cooksillustrated.com/how_tos/5803-salty-soak-for-beans
https://www.livestrong.com/article/541459-can-baking-soda-tenderize-dry-beans/
[4] Ibid. 

10.22.20