Hi All, so I’m going to a very small party tomorrow at a friend’s house that has a pool. We’re making burgers and brats and just general American sides and I promised I’d bring baked beans.
They look amazing, so I picked up all of the ingredients including dried Navy Beans (there were no canned beans at my store) and I soaked them for about 24 hours.
I’ve now been cooking them for about 3 hours and they’re still not remotely soft! The flavor of the sauce is good so I’m happy with that. Now I’ve moved them to a pressure cooker for 30 minutes to see what happens and after that I have to put them in the fridge. Tomorrow is the party and I could let them sit in a slow cooker for a while, but I’m wondering why they’re still so hard… Any ideas? At this point I still have a good 30 hours until we’re serving them…
As beans age they harden. Eventually it will take between 4 hours and never for them to soften.
I ran into this problem making Bean with Bacon soup a few weeks ago. I think the grocery store was down to the end of the supply of packaged beans, that package might have been on the shelf for a decade or more. Took about 5 hours before they were soft enough to mush up and thicken the soup.
Acid can do you wrong! Problem is, when beans become rock hard because of acid, there is usually no rescue.
Your choice:
(1) Continue with pressure cooker.
(2) Start over with dried beans. Instead of soaking overnight, use “quick soak” method. Don’t screw around with adding baking soda to the water. After quick soaking, dump out that water, start with fresh water. Onion, celery, garlic are okay to add at this point. Cook for 3 hours on top of stove, or overnight in crockpot. When beans are tender, add your delicious BBQ sauce.
(3) Drive all over town to buy canned beans. Since you are anxious about having the completed dish to take to the party tomorrow, THIS is probably your safest choice.
Sometimes you can add tomato products at the beginning of the bean cook. Sometimes you can’t. That’s just part of cooking.
~VOW
I soak my beans (including pintos) in a brine (as per Cook’s Illustrated), and they make the beans creamier and less prone to falling apart. Not sure if salting early in the cooking process would make that much a difference.
I read the recipe, and there’s apple cider vinegar in the sauce. So, that could be the culprit. Especially since the recipe calls for canned, not dried, beans.
Oops, on edit, if you scroll down to the bottom of the recipe, it does say you can use dried beans (and gives directions), but it still has the vinegar in the sauce.
Thank y’all for these comments, everybody. I’ve got a whole lot of dried beans of various kinds that I’ve been meaning to start cooking up one of these days, which I actually began doing recently. (Recall my recent thread, earlier this week, about slow-cooking.)
Knowing some of the things mentioned here could very well come in useful. I had no idea that soaking dried beans in acid would harden them even more. That sounds so counter-intuitive.
As a devotee of Maine baked beans when I want baked beans, I must say I find that recipe…reprehensible.
Beans to serve with BBQ would be a completely different matter. I would probably just stew those rather than put in an oven. And yeah, then it would be okay to add tomato, garlic, peppers, etc.
1 pound Maine yellow-eye beans
1/4 pound salt pork
1/2 cup Crosby’s Gold Star Barbados molasses
A jigger of dark or black rum
1 tsp Coleman’s mustard powder
Salt and pepper
A good quality two-quart bean pot, preferably decades old
Soak beans overnight, then simmer in the soaking liquid for an hour, or until the skin of a bean splits when you blow on it.
Preheat oven to 250. Cut the salt pork into small pieces and combine with the prepared beans in your bean pot. Stir in molasses and rum, and the mustard dissolved in a bit of water. Add 1/2 tsp each of salt and pepper. Pour over just enough of the simmering bean liquid to be visible through the beans. Cover the pot and bake for 5 hours, occasionally nchecking texture and seasoning and adding more bean juice, or water, as necessary. When the beans are soft and succulent, stir, uncover, and bake 1/2 hour more to thicken the cooking liquid into sauce.
So wait, you soaked the dried beans for 24 hours then just threw them into that recipe without cooking them first? Did you do the step where it says to cook the dried beans? If not… yeah, they’re not going to cook if you just threw them in with the rest of the ingredients. Canned beans = cooked beans. You can’t substitute uncooked dried beans and expect a recipe to work.
The molasses, ketchup, brown sugar, mustard, vinegar, and Worcestershire sauce are all acidic. If you add all those ingredients at the start, the beans will never get soft. As the recipe says, if you’re starting with dry beans you should cook them first, then add the flavorings.
BTW, the formatting of that web page is horrible. The actual recipe is at the bottom. Before that is a bunch of text and pictures that look sort of like a recipe, but include only enough detail to get a novice cook in trouble. And the instructions for dried beans are all the way at the end, where they’re easy to miss until it’s too late.
