Bean Recipes: Cooking Baked Beans In The Oven Without Soaking

There are many different ways to cook beans but this particular method totally fascinates me. This is another example of culinary basics and applying different cooking techniques to common food preparation and achieving a great result - the goal in preparing healthy recipes.

This is a recipe for 'no-soak beans' from The Fat Guy posted on egullet forums in 2007. He dispels the myth that you have to soak beans before cooking and that you can indeed heat them up to boiling and then put them in the oven to finish cooking.

Let's see how it's done!

INSTRUCTIONS

• Preheat the oven to 250 degrees.
• Take a package of beans - roughly about 1 pound 11 ounces (about 1-3/4 pounds) - or the equivalent in dried beans weighed on your kitchen scale - rinse and check for any damaged beans. These usually float to the top anyway and you can remove them then as well.
• Use about a 5-quart pan with a tight fitting lid. Add beans to the pan on the stove top and cover with cold water - about 1-2 inches above the beans.
• Add a bit of salt - he says up to 1 tablespoon but that seems excessive. Bring the pan to a nice rolling boil. He doesn't say to let them boil for a few moments but I would just to hopefully destroy any toxins that the beans might produce if undercooked (especially kidney beans).
• Once the beans have been boiled, put the whole pan (covered) into the oven. Check the beans in about 40 minutes to see if more water is needed. If so, at this point, add water but make sure the water is boiling at this stage to keep the temperature up.
• Recover the beans and cook for the a total time of about 1 hour 15 minutes - so 35-40 minutes longer.
• The only possibility of the beans needing longer than that to cook is that the beans may have been older so drier - ideally, they should be cooked after about 1-1/4 hours.

Here are some more great websites on how to cook beans and for bean recipes! Check them out for tips on how to store, cook and do the arithmetic on bean quantities

Vegancoach.com is a great source for recipes and how to cook beans of all sorts

Try fabulousfoods.com for tips on how to cook beans in a pressure cooker

For wonderful recipes, check out beanbible.com

Crock pot recipes for cooking beans can be found on about.com and their southern food section

In short, though there's a lot of boring information out there about beans, they are a wonderful food and a great source of protein, especially if you are a vegetarian.

Knowing how to cook them is the most important thing and this is just one of the many and varied ways to cook dried beans.

It's a unique way - in the oven and no soaking.  It is part of culinary basics to try new cooking techniques for different ingredients and see which method you like best and which one fits best into your individual creation of healthy recipes.  Hope this one is a useful one for you!

Hope this technique is one you find helpful! Happy cooking!