Burnt beans lead to better method

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Simmer beans in a wide pot for even cooking. (Courtesy Kate Leahy)

Updated: May 24, 2011 5:05AM

Who knew that burned cannellini beans smelled like coffee?

While lost in recipe editing one afternoon, the smell of malty coffee filtered into the room. This was unexpected. I was the only one home, and I hadn’t made coffee.

Upon entering the kitchen, the source was obvious. I had scorched a pot of cannellini beans. The beans themselves weren’t anything special. I had dug them out in a pantry-cleaning binge, thinking that I might as well cook them.

But old beans are terrible causes. They fall apart almost upon contact with water, or they stay tough as rocks. Sometimes, one bag will do both.

I tried to salvage the burned beans, pouring fresh water on them and scooping off the less-scorched top layer. I thought that the unintentionally smoky flavor might lead to a new discovery. (I was trying to find a reason not to apologize.)

I wasn’t successful. Even by using them in my favorite cannellini bean preparation — “re-fried” in a generous amount of olive oil — the burned beans failed to inspire.

The shortcomings of those beans caused me to rethink how I generally cook beans. I pulled out Harold McGee’s new book, Keys to Good Cooking: a Guide to Making the Best of Foods and Recipes (Penguin Press, $35). In his chapter on seed legumes, he recommends using a wide pot with a lot of surface area (faster, more even cooking), simmering them gently to keep the skins intact (so no boiling) and using fresh, high-quality dried beans.

That’s when I decided to leave the stove for the oven. If I cooked beans in the oven, my chances of burning them or boiling them would be significantly reduced. This time around, I also would set the timer.

A new batch of beans ( a pound of white navy), a different pot (a large, wide Dutch oven) and I was ready to go.

First, I soaked the beans overnight. You don’t need to soak beans for quite as long, but it doesn’t hurt. McGee recommends at least some soaking time. (A faster way, he writes, is to bring the beans to a boil, then remove them from the heat and let them soak for an hour.)

For no other reason, soaking and draining beans before cooking them reduces that well-known side effect of eating beans.

Once the beans were soaked, I diced a carrot, chopped half an onion and smashed a few garlic cloves. With a thin film of olive oil in the pot, I cooked the vegetables for a minute or so, just until warmed through. In went the beans and enough water to cover them by about an inch. I brought the pot to the simmer, covered it with a lid and put it in the oven.

After about 30 minutes, I removed the lid. After an hour, the beans were completely cooked to the point of being slightly overcooked. But for my Italian re-fried bean dish, they would be perfect.

A final point about bean cookery: salt. Some say adding salt early toughens beans, others say salt has no effect.

Here’s what McGee says: Go ahead and soak the beans in mildly salted water, but don’t add it to the cooking water until the end because it will take longer for the beans to cook. After removing the pot from the oven, I seasoned the beans generously with salt and let them cool on the stove.

Kate Leahy is a line cook turned food writer in Chicago. She writes the blog A Modern Meal Maker, (modernmealmaker.com), where this was posted.