Bean Cuisine Made Easy

I am not a vegetarian, but I love beans. When I eat beans and rice together I feel satisfied and full of energy. At the beginning of my relationship with Dick I started seeking out more and more bean recipes, mostly in Mexican and Indian cuisine. I’ve always used dried beans. (Canned beans don’t have much flavor and what they do have is unpleasantly metallic.)

I’m writing this post for friends and family who always ask me about beans. I wanted to gather my bean cuisine hacks all in one place for them so I don’t need to recreate a list in an email, hunt up links repeated, or have all of you miss out.

Note: I reorganized some sections of this post 11.28.25 at 10:40 p.m. It made more sense to me when I did this. There is no significant change in information, except I corrected a couple of typos.

In April 2018 I read an article about “Rancho Gordo Beans” in the New Yorker Magazine. I immediately started ordering beans from them. And from the first pot of beans I knew life was going to be more flavorful. Not only does this company have unusual beans you normally don’t find on grocery shelves, the beans from Rancho Gordo are fresher. Yes they are dried, but they haven’t been stockpiled and forgotten for years on grocery shelves. They cook up very quickly, regardless of whether you prefer to pre-soak or simply cook your beans. (Quickly compared to other old, dried beans; you’ll still have to spend a little time cooking beans.)

Let me just state that everything in this post is something that I bought. I am receiving no consideration from anyone for what I review here. I would encourage you to join Rancho Gordo’s Bean Club because it’s so much fun to get a quarterly box of beans that you might not have tried before. But you can also simply buy the beans on their list, that appeal to you. (I buy additional beans from them, not just the Bean Club.) And as for the equipment I mention below—I’m suggesting those items because they have made my life easier. I want it to be simple for you to cook with beans. Whether you do it everyday or once a month.

First some words about bean digestion. I understand that there are people who have difficulty with beans. What I have found over my life is that regardless of how I cook them (with the soaking water or new water, etc.) my gut is generally fine with beans. If I have not eaten them in weeks (which now never happens) I might have a slight issue. If I’ve been eating too much sugar any problem I’m having is definitely not the beans! 

I have a friend who takes an enzyme supplement when we go out for Mexican food. That seems sensible, why give up something that tastes so good?

So if you think beans are going to wreak havoc on your digestion please still consider beans. They are a nutritious and delicious food you might be able to eat with a couple of healthy (less sugar) adjustments and forethought (enzyme supplements).

But if your doctor has said no to beans for specific reasons to you—just stop reading now. There will be something else for you next week.

Bean Cuisine Hacks: Equipment

Cooking Vessels

Beans are very versatile and you can cook them a number of different ways and in a number of different vessels. If you cook on a conventional range and have an oven, you’ll want a large 5 qt Dutch oven or large steel pot (with copper base is nice) for cooking beans on the range. (The Dutch oven can also be put in the oven for cooking low and slow.)

There are so many manufacturers of these types of “pots” and the prices vary so greatly. My advice is do a little research and buy something of quality if you can afford it. It will be the last purchase of that type for your life if you treat the Dutch Oven or soup pot well. Inexpensive, poorly made versions will need frequent replacement.

Know that while there is a lot of buzz about Le Creuset Dutch ovens I have had a Staub and a Lodge for ages and both are fantastic and less expensive options. (They still have a high price tag compared to department store offerings, but will last decades as opposed to months—if heavily used.)

Some cooks will want to use their pressure cooker or Instapot. I would advise you not to. Rancho Gordo beans cook faster than other beans. I ruined a pound of Corona Beans (one of my favorites) by putting it in an Instapot and using a timing factor recommended by someone who claimed to only cook Rancho Gordo beans in his Instapot. (I wouldn’t recommend a regular pressure cooker for that reason as well—unless you want to work through the timing shifts for each type of bean you’re going to cook.)

Instead, a little planning and a little extra time while you’re kitchen adjacent (I have a reading chair right outside of the kitchen where I can observe and relax) will yield delicious, repeatable results.

Others may want to use their crock pot. I wore mine, from the 1980s, out and it didn’t get replaced. If you have one you’ll need to play with your cooking times—but at least you can look into the crock pot and see what’s happening and taste part way through.

Additional Cooking Gear

If you’re a regular reader of my blog you’ll know that I love process and I love improving efficiency. It doesn’t matter if it is binding a book, or baking bread, or making a pot of beans. I want to be able to do things quickly and easily and not repeat efforts. I do a lot of bulk cooking because of that—soups that freeze well, but other things too.

To make my life simpler I recommend the following:

Anyday glass cookware for the microwave. I heard about this company because Chef David Chang was talking about it. It seemed to make sense to me. I have the set at the link. Having this set makes quick work of heating blocks of frozen beans; steaming cauliflower; or pre-cooking diced potatoes before pan frying. I do other things with this cookware too, but if you want to use your microwave strategically without container worries this is what you need to get.

Anytime Freezer Tray (also from Anyday). I have an embarrassing amount of these. That’s because I sometimes make big batches of things two days in a row and I might have a tray freezing and not available for refilling. I recommend the 1/2 cup tray. We call the resultant food “pucks,” as in “I’m going to heat up a rice puck and make some beans with that.”

It is a breeze to unmold your frozen items from these trays. They are very resilient.

I use these trays to freeze the following:

Onions—I buy about 10 onions at a time. Some weeks I don’t get to cook as much and I still want to use the onions up so I caramelize them by slicing them thinly and heating them in a large flat-bottomed pan with a little butter. Then I fill up the silicone trays, freeze, and the following day I remove the onion pucks and put them in a separate container that goes into the freezer—I can pull that container out whenever I want onions already cooked. I take a frozen onion puck out, slice it as thinly as possible, and through the slices into a fry pan to warm them in only a minute. (Then I can bloom spices and be on my way with adding beans, vegetables, meat, whatever.)

Rice—I always need to have rice pucks available. Rice is my comfort food. I like to make a big batch so that I don’t run out, but freezing some means I’ll always have some within a minute if I don’t have any in the fridge.  (I place a rice puck on a plate, cover with wax paper, and zap in the microwave for 110 seconds. The rice springs back to perfection, ready to be paired with something.)

Anchovy pasta sauce— that I make in a batch of four 4-person servings. It means cutting up a lot of shallots and garlic, but if you double what is already a double batch it’s just quicker in the long run. Don’t know this recipe? Find it here.

Chicken broth—Leftover when I open a quart but don’t use an entire quart. (I also use the smaller freezer tray which makes 2-tablespoon pucks. These are just the right size to toss into vegetables or beans that you’re sautéing when you want some extra flavor.

All food these items, and many others, are frozen and organized in easy to access containers. 

Souper Cubes   are silicone freezer trays which come in larger portion sizes. They are perfect for single servings of soup or one cup servings of beans so you can add however frozen cups you need to your recipe. Before I found Souper Cubes I had some generic freezer tray molds that didn’t have the stiff top—by the time I’d wrestled the frozen food out of those molds my fingers were severely chilled! But Souper Cubes, with the stiff rim, make it easy to eject the frozen food.

I only use the 1-cup variety but they have other sizes available for your freezing needs. Like the Anyday freezer trays, I freeze my food, and then put the resultant frozen blocks (from Souper Cubes) into a more compact container to store in the freezer. Then I can wash and reuse the Souper Cubes again. 

Both Anyday and Souper Cubes can be used to store your food, but I find I can consolidate the frozen food better and save more space for food in the freezer, if I empty them after the food is frozen. I also then don’t have to have so many of these trays.

Neither Anyday nor Super Cubes trays have been stained or absorbed odors, unlike the inferior brands I first used.

I always put some bean broth in each cube of beans as it cuts down on any freezer burn.

The Souper Cubes are great for:

Soup—of course. Dick and I like the one-cup serving. We can eat dinner and each have a different type of soup if we want. If I’m making something for both of us I can just pull out multiple bricks of the same item, knowing each is a cup.

Beans—the subject of this post today! I mentioned that I like using the 1-cup Souper Cubes because I know when I pull out the frozen bricks that I’m dealing with cups, and can plan accordingly. A brick fits nicely in a microwave bowl (like your Anyday!) and you can zap it to thawed in a few minutes. (I’ll explain my whole bean process in a moment.)

And of course you can freeze other things in these as well.

Other Equipment You’ll Need

I mentioned pans for cooking the beans. For cooking the thawed frozen beans with your other food items you’ll need a frying pan (your choice of what you like to work with).

You’ll need some spatulas suited to your pan’s surface. (I have metal and silicone implements to use depending on which surface I’m working on. I also have wooden spoons and some people swear by them for no-scratch properties, but I don’t feel I can get them clean enough, so I tend not to use them.)

I also recommend some of those cooking bags made out of muslin. I like to use the bigger ones, as will be explained below.

Preparing and Cooking Your Beans: An Overview

Sorting and Rinsing

All dried beans need to be sorted and rinsed before cooking. Sometimes bits of grain or dirt adhere to the beans in packaging. I have to say that Rancho Gordo Beans are the cleanest dried beans I’ve ever used. I’ve rarely found anything in the pound of beans I’m sorting. Whereas when sorting grocery store beans I often found small rocks. Even so, just sort to be safe. 

You’ll need something to sort the beans in and to rinse the beans in.

I used to sort my beans using an old “Baker’s Square” perforated pie tin. The flat bottom allows you to spread the beans out so that you can see them, and even better, see around them for bits to pick out. (I also pick out cracked beans and beans that are deformed in some way that makes me think they won’t cook up well; or beans with holes in them. I don’t know if any of that selectivity is important, but I do it.)

During our protracted move the “magic” pie tin was lost.

I ended up using a flat bottomed strainer, and once sorted, go right to rinsing.

Suggestion: When I wanted to explore Indian breads I looked for a Parat (also called by some a Parant, I don’t know the nuances of this naming). I couldn’t find one without etching on the base which really annoyed me. I knew the bread dough would be difficult to clean out of that. I ended up finally settling on a 16-inch wide stainless steel deep dish pizza pan. It’s wide and flat so when I needed a new bean sorter I turned to it. I can spread the beans out and go through them carefully and quickly. The raised sides prevent me from flicking beans onto the counter. I then pour the beans into a rice rinser or a strainer to rinse. 

You can find those items readily and probably already have a strainer on hand. If it’s a flat-bottomed strainer you won’t need the flat pie pan.

Don’t rinse your beans until you’re ready to soak or cook them. Left sitting damp beans can start to clump together; and left long enough wet beans can sprout.

Cooking Your Beans

Once you’ve sorted and rinsed your beans it only remains to soak them, or go right to cooking.

There are so many cookbooks about bean cookery that I’m going to refer you to those master chefs at the END of my post under the heading: Recipe Resources. There are arguments for and against pre-soaks. Time factors will help you make a decision on what works in your schedule.

What I’ll do in my next section is explain how I manage beans to make it simple to incorporate beans into our typical meals without any involved planning.

Those master chefs I refer you to will also weigh in on pre-soaking or not. (I do either, and by that I mean, if I think in advance that I want a new, different bean that isn’t already cooked and frozen and waiting to go for tomorrow, than I will soak. But if it is already tomorrow and I know I am going to be at home without appointments, then I go right to cooking. I like to cook early in the day and I’m at home most days. If you work outside the home, depending on your schedule, you can still make beans for dinner if you are home early enough, but it might be better to think of cooking them in the evening to have ready for the next day. You’ll work it out, because beans are so tasty you will want to have them around all the time. My goal is to always have 3 or more different types of beans that have been cooked and portioned out in the freezer.

Bean Cuisine Hacks: My Process

The first thing you need to do is caramelize some onions when you are cooking onions anyway—freeze the excess as described above in some sort of portion tray. (I’m such a nut about onions I bought a fifty-pound-sack of them at the local restaurant market last fall—they just looked so lovely. Gave 10 lbs. to my neighbor, and broke the other 40 lbs. down in 4 days; which would have been faster but I ran out of freezer trays! They didn’t last long!)

Next cook some rice and freeze it using Anyday freezer trays mentioned above.

Buy dry beans. (I suggest from Rancho Gordo. I list some particular favorites at the end of my post.)

Decide that you want to have beans tomorrow (or later today).

Sort the beans.

(At this point I always put a couple of the beans I’m sorting in my bean jar—so I have something to sketch later. Just a suggestion.) I always cook a pound of beans. That’s the bag size from Rancho Gordo, and I’m going to be freezing some—so I just cook the whole bag.

Rinse the beans.

If you are having beans tomorrow let the beans soak overnight. If you want beans later “today” and have the time don’t worry about pre-soaking. (You will develop a rhythm to how all this works for you after you do it a couple times.)

If you are simply going to cook a pound of beans to be portioned out and used later (which I suggest) do this with every pot:

When you are about to start cooking the beans prepare your vegetables to cook with the beans. I use 2 large carrots quartered, 4 stalks of celery, one large raw yellow union, and about 6 cloves of garlic halved. I place these items in the muslin cooking bag. I sometimes have two small bags. I put the bag(s) in the bean pot with the beans and the water. I will remove and discard these bags and vegetables when the beans are finished cooking.

I used to dice these vegetables up and put them in the pot loose, but then when I reheated the beans there were boiled vegetables that had been cooked with the beans for a long time and the newer pan vegetables and I didn’t like the confusion of textures.

Cook the beans. I’m going to leave you to think about whether you want to cook them in the soaking water or not. There are several schools of thought on this. I like to cook my beans in their soaking water. Often I haven’t soaked so I put the rinsed beans in water and just start off cooking them with the vegetable bag.

Once the cook begins I find that bringing the beans to a boil for 15 minutes and then reducing to a simmer is the best approach. 

When to salt is another huge discussion point among bean cooks. Some say it messes with the skin and the softening if you do it too early or too late. I have tried several approaches. I currently don’t add salt to my beans until the last 30 minutes or so. And I don’t add much because I know when I cook with them later I’ll be salting my dish.  

I don’t use animal broth when cooking my beans because I know that anything frozen is a neutral base to start from. If you’re making something like the sofrito recipe in one of the cookbooks listed below, the beans are being made with a specific flavor profile to be used in a special way, so just go with that recipe.

Also I don’t like to use broth when cooking the beans because the beans have such a wonderful flavor unadulterated, with only the vegetables I’ve mentioned. Trust me, each of the beans you get from Rancho Gordo will have a distinct flavor and you’ll want to experience that flavor so you can start planning how you are going to use it in your recipes.

Depending on your cooking method there may be a time delay here—I generally draw or read, or get some paper work finished at the kitchen counter. 

I check the pot on the stove top (gas) every 30 or 45 minutes. You’ll get a feel for knowing when your beans are getting close too. When they start looking plump I take a bean out and try to crush it. I’ll keep cooking until the beans are the consistency we like (soft but not mushy).

Portion the beans: this is when I use the Souper Cubes, keeping some beans out if I’m going to use them for a meal right away. The rest of the beans get frozen into 1-cup bricks as mentioned above.

Everything that has happened so far can be done on any day that you want to cook. You only need a few minutes to sort, rinse, cut some vegetables, and set the pot going. It’s very simple. It isn’t a burden. I can’t encourage you enough to try it.

 

Preparing a Bean Dish 

Now that you have beens that are either freshly cooked or frozen you can start to prepare a bean dish for any meal. 

I’m going to explain how you use frozen beans so you can quickly whip something up on a day you didn’t make a fresh pot of beans.

Pull the bean portions out that you want to use out of the freezer. We find that 1 cup actually is great for a meal for two with vegetables and other items. You might have a bigger family.

If you are making a specific recipe that calls for canned beans know that a 15-0unce can of beans holds 1.5 cups of beans. So pull out a similar amount of frozen beans. (Extra beans you thaw for a specific recipe can be saved in the fridge for breakfast the next morning.)

I put the frozen bean bricks into the microwave (Anyday dishes are great for this) and I thaw them out. It takes only a couple minutes. I don’t mind if some of the beans are still frozen, that will be fixed in a few moments. Do this first so you will have the beans ready when needed. (If you have freshly cooked, still warm beans, no worries.)

For every cup of beans I’m going to be re-heating I will use half of a 1/2-cup puck of caramelized onions. So get that out and slice it into thin slices. It’s easy to slice because it’s frozen.

Place the frozen onion slices in a heated pan with a dab of butter. (Since the onions have been cooked with butter already you only need a smidge of butter to keep them from sticking until they start to melt and release the butter they were cooked in.)

Let the slices of frozen onion start to melt.

Gather your spices. Here’s where you can have tons of fun. Since you prepared the beans in a neutral fashion you can go any way you feel like going with your spices.

I love Mexican and Indian Spices. (I buy a lot of spices from Burlap and Barrel; Penzey’s is also a good source for fresh spices.)

I have small glass bowls that are for dipping sauce or something. I put my spices in them instead of my pan so I don’t spill spices into my pan.

I like to use black garlic, granulated garlic, Ancho Chili Powder, Chipotle chili powder, Cumin, and Coriander. You can of course use freshly chopped garlic. The dried garlic I used at this point is for time savings and still brings flavor.

Alternately I’ll use black garlic, granulated garlic and a series of Indian Spices.

Sometimes I’ll use powdered shallot or purple stripe garlic instead of the granulated garlic. I’ll also add Tomato Powder sometimes.

If you like the foods of France or Italy, now is the time to put those spices into your dish.

I also add black pepper freshly ground, and a little bit of salt (that’s really up to you, a little bit for me is a pinch or two, not much).

When the spices are in the amounts I want in the small dish, I sprinkle them over the melting onions in the pan. Stir and let the spices bloom for a minute on the heat.

Next toss the beans into the pan. Depending on the recipe I may drain them first and reserve the broth in case they get too dry, but in general, I dump the beans and broth in the pan at the same time. (There is enough broth that the beans are in liquid. This will thicken as you go.)

I let the onions, spices, and beans heat through. I make adjustments to the sauce as needed (adding a small 2-tablespoon puck of chicken broth, or a couple more spoonfuls of bean broth if it’s standing by and I feel either is needed). 

Depending on the recipe I may add concentrated tomato paste if I haven’t added tomato powder.

As the beans warm and the broth thickens I’ll often add a splash of Pineapple vinegar. Rancho Gordo sells the Pineapple vinegar and I love it; you can use a different vinegar. Apple cider vinegar is often good with beans depending on your spices. And you can also add lime or lemon at this point or depending on how you like to cook. Or you can add lime or lemon at the end because you aren’t adding liquid that needs to cook down.

While the beans have been cooking down (and this happens very quickly so keep watching and stir as necessary, turning down your heat if you need more time) you need to take your rice pucks out of the freeze and reheat them, which takes only about a minute to 90 seconds.

Now when your beans are finished you can scoop them onto the rice puck all nicely heated on a plate.

Sometimes I throw a couple eggs in the bean pan to the side as the beans finish cooking (when they are drier and not soupy). Over easy eggs are super delicious on beans and rice.

If you have these components you can literally have a meal in under 10 minutes. I can’t boil water for pasta and cook pasta in that time!

Alternative Options with Your Beans

Let’s say you don’t want to eat only beans and rice. Fine. Be that way. Just start a pot of boiling water before you start dealing with the process I just mentioned and make yourself noodles to go with the beans.

OR if you don’t want noodles but you love potatoes, start the process above by peeling and dicing potatoes, putting them in a large Anyday dish, and cooking them for about 5 minutes in the microwave—while you deal with getting the onions and spices ready for the beans, but haven’t started heating your pan yet. When the potatoes come out of the microwave, it’s time to heat the onions and spices and move on to adding the beans. 

I use two frying pans for beans and potatoes.

I use one 1/2-cup puck of onions. I slice the 1/2-cup puck of onions up. I place half the slices in the potato pan and I put half the slices in the bean pan. I make a little glass dish for spices for the potatoes, and one for the bean pan. (You’ll want to pick spices that work together because both foods will sit on the same plate.)

When the potatoes come out of the microwave I’ve already got the onions and spices warm in its pan. I toss in the potatoes and stir them about, cooking them to desired tenderness. This takes longer than the beans so I start with this.

Then the thawed beans go into the second pan that has its own onions and spices.

With minimal practice it all comes out at the same time and that time is always way less than 30 minutes.

If I’ve made my beans and potatoes spicy I add a dollop of plain yogurt on the side of my dish.

Dick usually puts hot sauce on his.

Don’t forget you can always make a couple over-easy eggs.

And if you don’t like potatoes (I know it shouldn’t be true but it is) then start this whole process by breaking down a head of cauliflower (or broccoli) instead of potatoes or rice. Put the cauliflower (or broccoli) pieces in an Anyday dish and cook them for about 4 minutes. Then take them out and mix them in a frying pan with spices and onion you set up for the cauliflower/broccoli. This makes a great side dish to the beans.

You can cook the cauliflower and other vegetables to completion in the Anyday, I just like to finish things in the frying pan because I like a bit of texture that frying step brings. (OK and I love butter, but I don’t use that much!)

I think from this you get the picture—in sometimes as little as 10 minutes, and certainly under 30 minutes, you can put a few things together with your beans to give you a satisfying meal.

If you want to make chili or a bean soup—well all you have to do is find a recipe you like, pull out the number of cups of frozen beans the recipe calls for.  (Remember there are 1.8 cups of beans in a 15 ounce can.) Thaw them out, and proceed as needed.

Don’t forget about bean salads—If you like beans dressed with a little bit of vinegar and olive oil you simply have to pull out the amount of beans, zap them, dress them, and mix with your vegetables. (Zap them for less time so they are not hot when you put them in your salad, or pull them out early and let them thaw in the fridge.)

This is the wonderful world of flavorful beans that awaits you. You can have a healthy meal even when the pantry seems bare, with just have these components on hand. It can be simple and easy if you just give it a little thought, and if you practice.

Below is a list of books with bean recipes that I can recommend to you. Things more varied than what I’ve described above, but all starting with having the beans. And we’ve just sorted that out right?!

Following the cookbook list I’ve listed some of my favorite beans from Rancho Gordo in case the variety they have is overwhelming to you and you want a place to start. But seriously, the other day I was listing my favorites for a friend and I got to sixteen, and Dick laughed and said, “Wait, what about this, it’s seventeen,” and so it goes. (I think it’s currently 19 beans and 3 varieties of peas.)

A Brief Word About Bean Broth

Before I leave the cooking advice I want to point out that if you cook a pound of beans at one time and you portion them into freezing trays as I’ve suggested you’ll have broth in each cube, but you’ll have broth leftover. SAVE THAT BROTH. Freeze it on its own noting which bean it comes from (as they all taste differently). 

If you have a recipe that calls for chicken broth or vegetable broth and you don’t have any, remember that you cooked those beans with a base of flavor-enhancing vegetables, and that bean broth has great flavor also from the beans, so go ahead and use it! It’s a great base for vegetarian soups as well if you cooked with oil not butter.

Recipe Resources

The first place I’d look for advice on cooking beans and for recipes is the Rancho Gordo website—where you need to be buying your beans. But here are some books to help as well.

The Rancho Gordo Vegetarian Kitchen, by Steve Sando and Julia Newberry

Heirloom Beans, by Steve Sando and Vanessa Barrington

Fagioli, by Judith Barrett (Italian Bean Cuisine)

Cool Beans, by Joe Yonan

Vegetarian cookbooks often have detailed explanations for cooking beans, check out the following:

Fast Vegetarian Feasts, by Martha Rose Shulman (She has a chapter on Sunday cooking for the week and a recipe for white bean soup that is superb.) I can say that this book changed the way I cook. I can’t recommend it enough.

The New Vegetarian, by Deborah Madison

How to Cook Everything Vegetarian, by Mark Bittman

Mexican cuisine is very bean forward so check out authors like Rick Bayless and Diana Kennedy.

Indian Cuisine makes use of beans in fabulous ways (look for “beans” or “dahl” in indexes) so check out books by Floyd Cardoz, Raghavan Iyer, Monisha Bharadwai, and Madhur Jaffrey.

When Dick and I first got together in 1980 Minneapolis was a city of co-ops (some survive) and all the co-ops had cookbooks and pamphlets with bean recipes, some excellent. I can’t recommend any of those titles because I lost those books in the move, and they are surely out of print. I mention them so you will keep your eyes open for them where you live, wherever healthy food is sold. Someone in your family may have some of these books tucked into their bookshelves. They are worth taking a look at. 

If you have cooks in your family—home cooks, professionals, it doesn’t matter—get their recipes. Interview them about technique. Find out their secrets before they are gone. Some might resist giving those secrets, but if they see your sincere interest I think they can be wooed. Give it a go.

Do you have any bean cook book recommendations? Please share them in the comments section of this post so we can all enjoy them.

Favorite Beans From Rancho Gordo

This is a list of beans I’ve purchased from Rancho Gordo that I have loved. I’ve bought others from them and enjoyed them too, but these are the ones I dream up dishes for.

Corona Beans (They now have California Corona Beans which are slightly smaller, I haven’t tried them yet. I’m sure they are great.) Don’t be intimidated by the size of these beans, and the fact that they may look a bit ugly when you start the cooking process. They plump up to deliciousness. I recommend always soaking these for best results.

If you want a great meat dish that is over the top with the addition of corona beans try Mexican Chipotle Pork and Beans from Recipe Tin Eats. I recommend the first time you make it to only use 1/3 to 1/2 a can of Chipotle Peppers in Adobo, and go from there. Nagi likes her food spicy! This is an addictive dish. I make it with Corona beans and whatever other variety I have on hand cooked in the freezer. (You need cooked beans from the freezer because the recipe calls for canned beans). But the Corona beans outshine the pork.

Ayocote Morado Beans (Just YUM. Really, that’s all I have to say about them. I love them for breakfast on toast, or with an egg, or with some rice, or in a salad. )

Alubia Blanca (a delicious white bean; great substitute for great northern white beans and such.)

If the only white beans you’ve ever eaten are canned or dried beans from the grocery store your head is about to explode. I have several white beans on the list because they go with just about anything; can take on any flavors you want to throw at them; and have delicious texture and flavor or their own.

Ayocote Blanco Bean (another delicious white bean; great substitute for great northern white beans and such.)

Caballero Bean (this might be the most delicious white bean ever grown; great substitute for great northern white beans and such.)

Ceci Piccoli (Small Chickpea; their large Garbanzo beans are great too. Look I’m not a Garbanzo bean fanatic. But these and the large ones have exceptional taste. Dick keeps asking me to make humus. I suppose I’ll have to at some point because these are so tasty—I’m not a humus fan, but I might be if I made it with these beans.)

King City Pink Bean (Better than a pinto. It’s a bean of history and literature, and too yummy. I have to say more about this incredible bean. This is the bean you could probably eat every day, made up in 10,000 different ways. But just plain they are killer.)

Santa Maria Pinquito Bean (So good with vegetables or potatoes. I haven’t even worked out all the things I think I could do with this bean.)

Domingo Rojo Bean (Great for red beans and rice, great in chili, great, great, great)

Cranberry Bean (I like it in soups)

Mayan Red Beans (As they say in there description on the Rancho Gordo site, it creates “a sauce that perfectly coats each grain of rice. YUM.)

Midnight Black Bean (I love black beans probably most of all beans and Rancho Gordo has a variety of them that I’m sure I would never have experienced if not for them. So continue reading the list with this in mind. They are all exquisitely tasty.)

Ayocote Negro Bean

Santanero Negro Delgado Bean

Chiapas Black Bean (Frijol Negro de Vara The BEST BLACK BEAN IN THE UNIVERSE.)

If you like Lima Beans (and I do) these are also great:

Green Baby Lima Bean (Delicate and great for late summer succotash.)

Christmas Lima Bean (a festive pattern on the skin, a delicious lima bean flavor)

I’m still working out what to do with the following two beans, but I enjoy both of them. 

Flageolet Beans

Marcella Beans

Recently (or so it seems to me, or maybe I just noticed) Rancho Gordo has started selling split peas (green and yellow). I cannot begin to explain to you how these will be different than any other split pea you ever tasted. I think it is because they are so fresh. They cook up immediately. I make a split pea and rice soup with them that has no pork in it (because I have difficulty finding Nitrate-free pork products normally used in split pea—and I react badly to nitrates).  Dick and I have bricks of this soup for breakfast, lunch, or  dinner. It is superb. (It’s a recipe I adapted from Martha Rose Shulman—mine is not a vegetarian option as I throw in some chicken broth. Make yourself a bowl of this with some fresh Red fife flour bread and you’ll think you’re in heaven.)

And because the New Year is fast upon us I need to point out that Rancho Gordo sells black-eyed peas that cook up so quickly you need to stay close by the pot and check sooner than you think!

The only bean I’ve ever bought from Rancho Gordo that I don’t care for is Good Mother Stallard Bean. They say it’s almost everyone’s favorite bean, but I find it a bit bitter. I find the bean broth of any black bean better than GMSB. I also find them slow to cook. Given I really love so many other beans, I don’t need this bean. Try it if the Rancho Gordo description sounds appealing when you’re browsing, but I would try all the other beans on my list first!  

10 years ago my bean range was so limited now there are so many more possibilities.

I’ve been typing for a long time. I’m going to thaw some beans out and make a meal; while I put on a new pot of beans and start the whole cycle all over again. 

You can do this. Cooking beans from scratch is easy, and fun. Of course this is coming from a woman who thinks breaking down 40 lbs of onions is meditative.