Cooking Beans

Last Sunday I showed you my new pressure cooker and mentioned that you could cook dried beans in it in a short time and I would let you know how that worked when I tried it. On Thursday this week I gave it a go.

The book that came with the cooker says for every cup of food add 3 cups of water. So I put in two cups of washed dried pinto beans and six cups of water. It also said to add 1 tsp of vegetable oil (I used olive oil) for every cup of water to keep it from foaming. Then it said to put the lid on, set it for High pressure at 3 minutes which I did. It took it about 12 minutes to come to pressure and then to it started to cook for 3 minutes. At 3 minutes it shut off to warm and I hit the stop button and let it release pressure naturally as it said to do. When I took the cover off this is what they looked like:

 

They had cooked but to me they needed more cooking as they were firmer than we liked them, so I put the lid back on and repeated the process for another 3 minutes. They came out like this:

 

They look about the same, but these were softer. I had to rinse them off because of the oil. I think 6 tsps of oil might be a little much. We decided that we like our beans cooked all day on the stove slow with onions and ham hocks added and cornbread. If you wanted beans but forgot to soak them overnight this would be a good way to do a quick start. I think maybe what the directions meant but didn't say was 3 minutes per cup of food is the cooking time. So there you have it. I really like the pressure cooker and will keep trying recipes and let you know if I find a keeper. If you have one of these pressure cookers do you use it and do you like it? Let me know if you have a favorite recipe to use  in it.