Hard Cook Beans

I never soak beans. I bring them to pressure in my stainless steel pressure cooker, cook at pressure for 55 minutes. Never salt until they are done. Perfect every time. I cook 2 lbs of beans about every 5 days as we eat them every day for lunch.

you crack me up with that one!

I think cooking in a pressure cooker is THE most frugal way to cook dry beans of any kind. Less than an hour and your done rather than many hours and they still might not be done. I always cook my beans in a pressure cooker.

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Trisha in WA
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What else does a man have to do in his short time here on earth than build soil and feed people~Forerunner

Pressure cooker is the way to go. Especially when you are up at altitude, 7500'+

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I'm at 4200' and I cooked a batch of beans the regular way (when we first moved here) ALLLLL day and they were still crunchy. I learned my lesson. Then I read somewhere about pressure cooking them. I'll never go back to the "regular" way even if we move to a lower elevation.

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Trisha in WA
Visit my blog @
Diamond Belle Ranch

What else does a man have to do in his short time here on earth than build soil and feed people~Forerunner

When I find old beans I soak them 24 hours or even longer. 8 hours isn't long enough. Change out the water twice a day. Exactly the way you do for sprouting.

Then I bring them to a boil and simmer for a bit while I gather my supplies. Then fill quart jars to the two and a half to three cup mark, add boiling broth (usually ham or pork broth) and pressure can them.

That's about as frugal as it gets. Cook once = seven meals worth of beans done. The oldest beans I've canned were 8 years old.

Old beans come out wonderful in a pressure cooker.

In fact its the only way I will cook beans as I am not a think ahead cook LOL

Mrs Whodunit

How much water do you add to the pressure cooker? My cooker is a six quart model.

When you get hard beans like that, just add a pinch of baking soda and cook a while longer. The soda will soften them right up, but don't use too much or they'll turn to mush, lol...ask me how I know. You might start with a little pinch and if they haven't gotten soft enough after a little while add a little more. After the first time, you'll know for sure how much the next time. It's an old country trick, but I've never seen it fail.

Pressure cooking works too, but I'll let oldmania answer jmtinmi's question directly. From my experience, I have a 4-quart cooker. I cook 1 pound of pinto beans at a time, rinse, add a few chunks of ham or salt pork and about a tablespoon of bacon grease (hey, I never said they were healthy, lol) and fill my pot to about the halfway mark. Pressure cook at 15 pounds for 25-30 minutes, and they're done. I don't salt or anything until they're done.

The general rule for pressure cookers is to never fill them more than 2/3 full and only about 1/2 for beans, as they tend to foam up and block the vent tube. Hwever, adding oil of some sort to the cooking water helps prevent that also.

I wouldn't waste lots of energy or days of work on hard beans either, but it's a quick and easy fix and might come in handy some day if that pound of beans is hard to come by. Good luck!

Raw beans (except Asian ones - mung and Adzuki) are poison. Do a search on "red bean poison". It also applies to white beans, but only one-third as much. Feeding the porcelain is not a good way to spend 48 hours. Nor is killing your chickens. You have to have AT LEAST ten minutes of free boiling in water, preferably fifteen, to inactivate the poison. You can do that in a slow cooker eventually, but a solid clogged-up mass just barely warmed over in a slow cooker won't get the temperature you need all through it.

Slow cookers often work, but not always.
Best (in your case) is soak them one hour in warm-hot water, pour it off and start/soak again, but for 24 hours. Pour it off (each pour takes away some poison), pressure cook (canner or cooker).
DO NOT add anything until after they are soft. Salt (and almost everything adds salts of some kind) toughens them up.
If they are still tough, use bicarb of soda (baking soda). It's a salt too, of sorts, but it's different, and way different after they are already somewhat cooked. If you use soda bicarb, don't use salt. They are both sodium salts, and blood pressure doesn't need too much sodium.

If that works then distilled water should work as well.

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