I’m trying to incorporate more beans into my diet and am finding it quite difficult to get my beans the way I want them to be. I’m curious to hear your guy’s standard bean recipes. Do you guys use canned or dried beans? Stovetop or microwave? Any secret ingredients?
Here’s what I’d call my standard bean procedure.
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First, I start with canned beans. Dried beans are a bit firmer it seems, but I don’t feel like dried impacts the flavor enough to be worth the soak time.
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If I have it, I’ll grate half of an onion into the beans. I don’t like onion crunch.
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Microplane dried mushroom into it for extra protein and flavor
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Salt, pepper, granulated garlic, paprika and chili flakes. I don’t really like how garlic powder works with the beans and don’t feel the need for fresh garlic. Fresh ginger is really fire in it though. I add things on top of this usually for more flavor, but this is just my standard bean.
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Microwave for 3 minutes
I’d do more if it made a difference in flavor, but so far I can’t seem to make anything really make the beans pop. What do y’all do?
Try a star anise. Not enough that you can taste it, just enough to give it a deeper flavor.
Sometimes I use “low-sodium” broth instead of water. It’s one of the rare cases where store-bought broth doesn’t ruin it.
Be aware, acid stops beans from softening. Don’t add tomato or lime juice or anything like that before cooking.
If you already added your acid, or just want to cook the beans faster, you can add a little baking soda to raise the pH.
Also if you’re using a pressure cooker and don’t want to get super gassy, but also don’t want to soak the beans for 6 hours, you can just add boiling water to the beans and soak 20-30 minutes.
If you added too much water, you can soak it up by adding a tiny bit of long-grain rice, high pressure cooking for 0 minutes, then waiting ~8 minutes for the water to get absorbed into the rice before releasing pressure.