Pressure-Cooker Beans Help

Since I received a pressure cooker as a gift earlier this year, I've fallen in love with it. Stocks, stews, roasts all come out perfectly and quickly. It's one of my favorite kitchen tools.

I had never tried beans in the cooker until recently. I tried a recipe for lamb and white bean stew in Jacques Pepin's "Fast Food My Way". I followed the recipe closely, but it basically consists of throwing a bunch of ingredients (lamb shoulder chops, dry white beans, onion, leek, canned tomatoes, herbs, water) in the cooker and leaving it under high pressure for 40 minutes. The first attempt, all of the beans came out hard and just barely cooked.

I assumed that I didn't keep the pressure high enough, so on my second attempt, I made sure that the pressure was kept at a pretty strong level the whole time. It was a little better the second time. Some of the beans were totally cooked (maybe partially overcooked), but many of them were still very hard. The lamb could not have stood another 5 minutes in the cooker before it would have been obliterated.

So, what am I doing wrong? There's plenty of liquid in there, and if I cook it any longer the lamb will be reduced to bits and pieces. I'm tempted to just try a pot of white beans on its own just to see how those come out.

Best,
Michael

Michael,

Have you tried soaking the beans overnight before starting the recipe? That might help soften them up a bit.

Michael,
Try letting the pressure release by itself instead of quick release. I don't soak the beans before using the pressure cooker but the recipes I have tried say not to use quick release therefore giving them a few minutes more to cook.
Paulette

I'm with stevez - I've never done a successful bean recipe without the soaking step, even though many recipes tell you to skip it - I think I tried to make the moros for moros y cristianos in the pressure cooker once, with the results you mention. I've also had this happen to beans in the slow cooker, which you would think would offer enough time to soak up the cooking liquid.

What I did discover is that after the soaking process, you can freeze the beans and keep them handy until you want to use them. I've also substituted frozen peeled edamame when I don't have soaked beans on hand.

stevez wrote:Michael,

Have you tried soaking the beans overnight before starting the recipe? That might help soften them up a bit.

Nope. The whole point of the recipe, and using the pressure cooker, is that it's a quick, easy meal with no special planning required.

Also, every other bean recipe for pressure cooking I've seen never speaks of soaking.

paulette wrote:Try letting the pressure release by itself instead of quick release. I don't soak the beans before using the pressure cooker but the recipes I have tried say not to use quick release therefore giving them a few minutes more to cook.

The recipe does call for quick-release, which I did both times. I'm a little worried that letting it release naturally will just continue cooking the meat to the point that it's obliterated.

Two other possibilities:

Beans do have a shelf life. Older beans will never really soften up.

Is there salt in the water? That will toughen beans.

Then there's this:

A warning: All dry beans should be soaked overnight, boiled hard for 15 minutes and then simmered until soft. If these simple rules are not followed, your run the risk of food poisoning, particularly prevalent from poorly cooked red kidney beans. The beans contain a toxic agent called phytohaemagglutinin, or lectin. It causes red blood cells to clump together, resulting in nausea, vomiting and diarrhoea. Recovery is usually spontaneous, although hospitalisation is sometimes necessary. You have been warned!

Beans, the silent killer! Okay, not exactly silent...

Yikes. That's a new one. First I learn that green onion can poison me, now beans. Great.

There is a little salt in the stew, but not much. Shelf life might be an issue here. Thanks.

I've found a couple other recipes that call for soaking for an hour in boiling water or cooking the beans by themselves under pressure for 5 minutes and then discarding the water and adding in the rest of the ingredients. I think I'll try that next.

Best,
Michael

Michael, I'd suggest the overnight presoak too (or at least the quick soak in boiling water for an hour or so).

Actually, first I'd suggest you retry the recipe with a new batch of dried beans. It may be that the beans you got weren't stored properly - that makes the seed coat hard to cook. This is a known problem with beans, the technical name for it is Hard-To-Cook (HTC) defect*.

Semi-related: I usually don't put salt when I'm pressuring lentils, and very little or none when doing beans, including garbanzos. I do add a pinch of sodium bicarbonate (baking soda) - I believe to counter any acidicty from the seed coat that may render it hard to cook - though I do it as a matter of course and am not certain.

*Really, now - surely, you don't think I'm kidding. See this.

The age of the beans is a factor and, as someone who cooks up dried beans and other legumes with great frequency, I have very specific ideas concerning which beans I buy from which store; basic varieties I get at Graziano's and am always happy. Other sorts, only from appropriate ethnic places where there seems to be good turnover and I've had success in the past.

I find it very strange that any recipe would call for cooking together dried beans and other ingredients, such as meat or vegetables. The latter will inevitable be mush before the beans cook. Unless, of course, they're magic beans.

At the very least, and this will allow for some of the 'speed' the recipe promises, try the quick soak method: wash the beans, place them in a pot full of cold water, bring it to a boil, turn off the heat, and allow them to soak (cover on) in the pot for at least one hour. If the beans aren't old, this quick and hot soak works very well and the subsequent cooking time should be reasonably short or long, depending on the bean variety, just as if you had soaked them all night.

That said, cooking beans from the dry state strikes me as part of my 'slow food' philosophical approach to cooking and I have no desire to make quickly what should take time.* If time is short, there's always spaghetti all'aglio e olio... And if you want a legume that will be done in 45 minutes or an hour, there are always lentils.

Antonius

* Well, that's a slight exaggeration. I do use short cuts, to be sure, and one I use will no pangs of conscience is the occasional can of beans. Beans from a can are not as good as beans cooked from scratch, but they're still darn good and better than most other canned products. Some brands are MUCH better than others, as has been discussed at some length elsewhere on this board, I believe. But for any special occasion or special dish, I prefer to cook them up from scratch. More on this anon...

eatchicago wrote:I've found a couple other recipes that call for soaking for an hour in boiling water

This is a substitute for soaking overnight.

***

I will offer this information relative to my experience in pressure canning of vegetables. When I bring the canister to pressure, I don't close the system until I have seen a continuous flow of steam released from the pot for 10 minutes. Why?

National Center for Food Preservation wrote:Air is trapped in the closed canner during the process. Air trapped in a pressure canner lowers the temperature obtained for a given pressure (for example, 10 or 15 pounds pressure) and results in underprocessing. To be safe, USDA recommends that all pressure canners must be vented 10 minutes before they are pressurized.

You may not need to do a full ten minutes, though you do need to see some minutes of continuous steam before sealing the system. (Pressure canning/cooking are similar enough activities, you might find it worthwhile to read the link the quote above derived from)

I don't know how your system alerts you, when you are at pressure. I have one canner with a weight that rocks (the other one has a gauge). When at peak pressure, I don't expect to rock back and forth aggressively. It is enough to hear it tweedle a few times a minute. Aggressive tweedling is when a lot of excess pressure is building and it is releasing pressure with each tweedle to maintain the 10 or 15 pounds pressure selected.

At least for canning recipes, a slow measured release of pressure is planned into the processing time. Moving a pressure cooker over to a cool location will speed the cool down, which is not desirable for canning and probably for your purposes as well. I made this mistake early on, though I now just let it decompress on the burner I used to heat it up.

***

I will venture to guess your bean problem is related to not enough time allowed to expelling air from the system before sealing. It may have been a problem all along, though it wasn't really evident until you did beans.

Regards,

Antonius wrote:That said, cooking beans from the dry state strikes me as part of my 'slow food' philosophical approach to cooking and I have no desire to make quickly what should take time. If time is short, there's always spaghetti all'aglio e olio... And if you want a legume that will be done in 45 minutes or an hour, there are always lentils.

This isn't an example of a search for a quick-cook bean recipe (after all, there are canned and jarred white beans) or that I can't figure out what to cook quickly (I pride myself on my ability to get home from work by 6 and have a very good dinner on the table by 7 or 7:30).

This is rather an example of following some ideas from Pepin's cookbook which has served me very well. I'm not trying to thumb my nose at any specific philosophy or find a shortcut around a problem, but rather follow a recipe that is designed for a specific purpose.

Best,
Michael

eatchicago wrote:This isn't an example of a search for a quick-cook bean recipe (after all, there are canned and jarred white beans) or that I can't figure out what to cook quickly (I pride myself on my ability to get home from work by 6 and have a very good dinner on the table by 7 or 7:30).

This is rather an example of following some ideas from Pepin's cookbook which has served me very well. I'm not trying to thumb my nose at any specific philosophy or find a shortcut around a problem, but rather follow a recipe that is designed for a specific purpose.

I don't think I attributed any sort of philosophical approach to YOUR use of the recipe but rather commented on MY (philosophical) reaction to that recipe. To ME it seems an odd thing to do, to try to get dry beans to cook in the same time as other (soft) ingredients and though I hold Pépin in the highest regard, I'd be surprised if this recipe achieves optimal results. Clearly, the use of the pressure cooker and the 'throw-it-all-in-together' method is intended for ease and speed: if it works, that's great, though not something I'll try; beyond any philosophical horseshit, I don't have a pressure cooker.

Antonius

I agree that generally speaking, combining dry beans with other ingredients in a pressure cooker seems to be at odds with expecting everything to be cooked to the correct consistency.

While I would typically soak and/or pre-cook beans, the Pepin book I have ("Today's Gourmet II") has two recipes with beans with the following methods:
In "Puerto Rican Pork and Beans" the dried red kidney beans are included with everything else (country-style pork loin spareribs) and simmered for 1.75 to 2 hrs.
In "Lamb Shanks and Beans Mulligan", small white or Great Northern dried beans are soaked in cool water while the lamb shanks are browned (about 30 mins). Then everything is placed in cold water and boiled gently (covered) for 2 hrs.

Pressure cooking should simply reduce the time for the above recipes - and not have any other effect. So I guess Pepin works with fresh dried beans. Alternately, he may like a harder/firmer bean. Uncooked beans as Michael got may be due to the HTC defect...

At any rate, further discussion of Michael's bean cookery seems moot till he tries the same recipe with a fresh/new batch of beans. Maybe one doesn't need to precook beans - but that seems unconventional to me.

Michael, do post the outcome.

sazerac wrote:Michael, do post the outcome.

OK. So the dinner rotation brought this one up again. This time I gave the beans the "quick soak" method (a couple minutes at a hard boil, then off the heat in the water for 1 hour).

I followed the recipe with the soaked beans and it came out pretty well, but the beans were heading towards over-done. Next time, I'll either do the same thing at a lower pressure level or for slightly less time.

I'll keep at it because I enjoy this meal. It's a nice quick stew of leeks, onions, tomato, beans, and lamb. Served over couscous, it's a very enjoyable, simple weeknight meal.

Best,
Michael

I made a bean soup recently; decided to try it in the pressure cooker I had recently purchased. I did a long soak (all of the recipes I saw, with the exception of a couple, recommended a soak) and cooked the beans and pork on high for a short time - 15 minutes maybe? And they were slightly over-cooked.

I like the pressure cooker, but have found it takes some experimenting to get the times right for personal tastes. I've also found that recipes vary wildly - I looked up ten recipes for one dish I was going to try and had times from 15 minutes to 2 hours! Very strange.