In the world of beans, convenience comes in cans, but—for flavor, texture, and looks—you have to cook your own. Here’s all the info you need to CYOB.

Buying
Most stores sell dried beans in packages (cheap), and some offer them in bulk (cheaper). If you’re buying in bulk and eye-balling quantities, a pound is a little more than 2 cups. Check the “best if used by” date on packaged beans and choose the latest one.

Storing
Dried beans will keep pretty well in your cupboard for a year, but fresher is better.  Also, cooking time increases with age, so use them as soon as possible. Keep them in an air-tight container or sealed bag. No refrigeration needed.

Soaking
We rarely soak our beans. They go from package to dish towel to strainer to pot.

Before Cooking
Always pick over and rinse beans before cooking. To pick over them, spread them out in a single layer on a dish towel of a contrasting color. Then roll them around a bit. Remove any moldy beans, bean fragments, or rocks. (Yes, rocks!) Transfer the picked-over beans to a strainer or colander and rinse well. Then transfer them to a pot and add water.

Water
If your beans come in a package, you can follow the instructions on it. We buy in bulk and use these guidelines for 1 pound of beans.

8 cups water for black beans and black-eyed peas

10 cups water for cannellini beans

12 cups water for whole chickpeas

Yield
1 pound dried beans yields about 6 to 6 ½ cups cooked beans

Boiling over
Due to their high protein content, beans tend to boil over during cooking. To prevent boil-over, use a large pot (we use a 10-quart pot for 1 pound of beans) and cook over low heat. If you don’t have a giant pot, add a teaspoon of oil to your beans at the start of cooking. The fat will disrupt the proteins and you shouldn’t have a problem. We cook our beans in a covered pot unless the recipe indicates otherwise.

Salt
We salt the cooking water because we think it makes the beans taste better. We add ½ teaspoon salt to 1 pound beans at the beginning and then add more after cooking. A good rule of thumb for total salt is ½ teaspoon per cup of dried beans, unless you plan to add other salty ingredients, such as soy sauce.

Flavoring
If you want to keep your options open so you can use the beans in different recipes, you probably won’t want to get too crazy flavoring them at this stage. We occasionally add a chopped onion or a whole head of garlic with the top ½ inch sliced off.

Cooking Time
These are approximate because cooking time varies with bean age.

10 to 40 minutes for lentils (red, golden, brown, green, French green)

1 hour for black-eyed peas

1 to 1½ hours for black beans

2 hours for cannellini beans

2 to 3 hours for chickpeas

Doneness
Doneness is a matter of taste and you have to figure this one out for yourself. We like our beans cooked so that they’re tender but still have a little bite to them (slightly al dente). We usually test by mashing one between our fingers first. Then, if it seems pretty close to what we want, we taste a few. You should taste more than one because there’s a certain amount of variability among the beans.