A pot of perfect beans
We’re Fanny and Greta, dear friends with deep backgrounds in sustainable food. This is a space for the food lovers, home cooks, would-be home cooks and anyone who needs a bit of inspiration and gentle guidance in their family kitchen.
Santa Anna•
April 3, 2025
While beans and rice make a perfect meal, there are a million things you can do with a pot of beans over the course of a week. Use them in tacos or smash them into quesadillas, make them into Ali Slagle’s black bean soup, throw them into The Only Minestrone, make our Sweet Potato + Black Bean Veggie Burgers, toss them with a handful of arugula and a squeeze of lemon for a gross-looking but delicious lunch salad, add them to our Nachos recipe, use them in place of chickpeas for a hummus-like bean dip. The possibilities are endless.
But, please, make sure you buy the freshest dry beans you can find. Choose beans that are unbroken and uncracked with visibly smooth, glossy skin. Aim to eat them within a year—check the harvest date and/or expiration date and favor beans that haven’t been sitting on the shelf for ages. Nothing spoils a potentially transcendent pot like a bad bean—stale beans will take forever to cook (even if they’ve been soaked) and no amount of fried garlic or onion, or bacon fat, or chicken stock, or herbs will make them taste like much of anything. Just ask Fanny about the time she tried to cook black beans for Irish friends on a trip to Dublin in 2007.
The night before (or morning of), soak the beans (1 lb) in water. When you're ready to cook them, strain and rise.
Pour a few glugs of olive oil into a heavy-bottomed pot and add the onions and garlic. Cook over low-medium heat for 5ish minutes, until the onions are soft but nothing is starting to color too much.
Then add the cumin (2 tsp) and oregano (2 tsp), stir and cook together for another 3 minutes.
Add the beans, bay leaf (1) and enough water to cover them by an inch. Turn the heat to high.
When the beans are at a rolling boil, turn the heat way down to low and cover the pot.
When they're starting to get soft, add a few pinches of salt
salting prematurely will toughen the skins
Cook until the beans are velvety and tender—when you first think they're done, they probably need another 20 minutes.
Salt to taste when the beans are 1000% cooked through and cooled enough to properly taste.
When they're piping hot, you won't be able to fully taste the salt you're adding. Learn from our mistakes!
You can totally make these with canned beans but they won’t be quite as flavorful. If that’s all you have around, though, go for it. Follow the directions below and add 1 cup of water when you add your strained canned beans to the pot with garlic and onion. Cook over very low heat for 20-30 minutes. Once the flavors have married, remove half a cup of beans and liquid and blitz them in a blender before folding them back into the pot. (An immersion blender works well for this, too!)
