If you’ve been reading Basically for a minute, you’ll know we’re big fans of cooking with dried beans. And if you haven’t, well, we are. The flavor and texture that properly cooked dried beans bring to the table make the canned stuff feel like child's play. The skins are in tact and firm, and when you bite into them, the insides are smooth and flavorful. But dried beans are a little bit more of a commitment to make, seeing as they’re...dried. A lot of recipes will tell you that soaking beans overnight is non-negotiable, but is that really the case? Do you really need to wait that long to eat marvelous, tasty beans?
The short answer to this question is no. You don’t have to soak your dried beans overnight. We’ll get to what you can do instead in a second, but first, a note about why we soak beans. Soaking beans in the refrigerator overnight will reduce the time they have to cook drastically. And the texture of the beans will also be it their best, with fewer split-open and burst ones. But like we said, you don’t have to commit this hard. If you’re the impatient, bean-hungry type, you can cook your beans from dry without any soaking at all.
Here's the thing: Beans that have not been soaked ahead of time will always take longer to cook, but they will, indeed, cook. But timing aside, sometimes we actually like to cook beans straight from dry, as is the case with this easy black bean soup recipe. The reason we like to cook beans from dry when making certain soups is that the liquid that they're cooked in becomes a delicious broth, negating the need for any boxed stock to give it body and depth. If you start by building flavor in the bottom of a large stock pot by sweating aromatics and chopped vegetables, you can add spices, water, and finally beans to build a satisfying broth over time.
