The Soaking Technique For Preventing Bland Dried Beans

While canned beans are convenient, dried beans are cheaper, and when times are tight, sometimes you need to pinch every penny. Still, there's no need to suffer through bland beans when you can use the same thing canning companies are — salt. This is the advice we received from chef Alex Abreu, who works at two Boston-based restaurants: Vela Seaport and Deck 12.

Abreu acknowledges that cooking dried beans can be time-consuming as they take longer to cook than the canned kind (which really only need to be heated up unless you're eating them cold in a dish like cowboy caviar or bean salad). Dried beans also require a lengthy soaking time, but Abreu says that this time can be put to good use to boost their flavor as well as soften them up. As he tells us, "I recommend soaking them in a lot of salted water before cooking to help hydrate them faster and enhance their taste." Brining dried beans, he says, "gives [them] more of the saltiness that we find in canned beans."

Okay, so we've established that you should add salt to your bean water as per Alex Abreu's recommendation, and don't skimp on it either — a tablespoon per pound of beans ought to do the job. That's not the only addition you can make to the brine, though. As long as the beans are just sitting there soaking in salt, they could also be absorbing a few other flavorings in the form of peppercorns, dried chiles, cinnamon sticks, coriander seeds, or other spices and seasonings.

One ingredient you might wish to add to the brine is something that won't make the beans less bland but could help cut down on other unwanted side effects. Beans, while a nearly perfect food in most respects, have one major flaw that makes some reluctant to embrace them: A tendency to produce, ahem, a steady supply of biogas. ("Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat" author, Samin Nosrat may have earned the right to make fart jokes, but we'll pass on the opportunity. Oh wait ...). If you add a teaspoon of baking soda to each gallon of soaking water, it won't do much to enhance the flavor but should help reduce some of the beans' gas-producing properties. You might also want to toss in a pinch of either epazote or ajwain as some cooks claim these spices also have gas-suppressing powers.