jjomall
Assistant Cook
So I was trying to cook a baked bean recipe I had used before but with canned beans. The recipe calls for 3 cans of Great Northern Beans, but I wanted to used dried beans instead (less sodium). I tried soaking them which was a 7 hr soak, I put 2 cups of dried beans in about 6.5 cups of water at 9 am and took it out at about 5 pm. Made my recipe and put it in the over at 350 for 1.5 hrs. When I took it out the beans were not cooked, they were still hard, I mean they could be eaten but it was not very enjoyable. I put it in 2 more times totaling an additional hour and the beans still don't seem cooked to me. So let me first say that I think of cooked beans as being something like what you eat after eating Bush's beans, soft but not mush. So now the questions:
- How do I properly cook the beans so that they get to that soft stage and are not still hard and undercooked?
- Is it better to soak the beans overnight and then still leave them in the water until I cook that evening or is that too much soaking time?
- Finally, after my first taste test I looked up dried beans and read that they don't even need to be soaked, what are people's experience with that and how much longer do the beans need to be cooked?