Cooking Beans in a Slow Cooker

When the original Crock-Pot® was developed in the Sixties, it was designed to be used to cook beans. To this day, I find that purpose to be its ideal use. Beans so cooked are flavorsome and tender.

A vegan hint is to add a piece the size of your thumbnail of kombu, a seaweed that you can find at natural food stores, to the cooking liquid. It helps immensely with digestibility.

One pound of dried beans will produce three or four canning jars, pint-sized, of cooked beans, when filled as prescribed with an inch or so of head-room from their lids.

I’ve learned from Robin Robertson in her Fresh from the Vegan Slow Cooker that salt-soaking improves the resulting beans. Add 2 T of salt to 4 quarts of water for overnight soaking, or 2 T of salt to 2 quarts of boiling water for the quick, one-hour, method.  (For the one-hour method, move the pot of salted water and beans off the flame for the hour.) Of course, you need to rinse and sort the beans before soaking them, and with the salt-soaking method, you need to rinse the salt off following the soaking—else the beans will cook up tough!

Lentils and split peas do not need to be soaked, unless the soup or other recipe that you are following specifically requires soaking.

White kidney beans or cannellini beans need to be boiled hard for five minutes before placing them in the slow cooker; ditto red kidney beans. Else they emit a toxin! The cannellini beans have the most neutral taste of all beans, hence are desirable in many recipes and are thus more expensive than most beans.

Personally, I find garbanzo beans/chickpeas/ceci to be the most versatile. And I love black beans in salads—and you know how good they are in Tex-Mex dishes when you don’t want pinto beans! Those latter tend to be the cheapest bean.

I also like to have in the house green split peas and red lentils. The former adds color to a dish that would be muddy with yellow split peas. The latter cook to the same bland color as any other lentil, but I find their texture preferable.

All of that said, even canned beans are cheaper gram of protein for gram of protein than just about any other source. So, if you can’t find the time to soak and cook beans—well, don’t forget the canned variety! (Just be sure to drain them and then rinse them thoroughly with cold water—and rinse again. The process will help to rid them of the “canned” taste.)