Sous Vide Black Beans
I couldn’t find a recipe for making dried beans sous vide for my Sous Vide Supreme, so I winged it. It worked really well.
1 cup dried black beans, rinsed 1 diced medium red onion Roughly the same volume of beans in ice cubes
Preheat SVS to 180F. Seal all ingredients in a vacuum bag.
Cook for 36 hours. After 24 hours, I squeezed the bag and it still felt a little firm, so I put them back in. The beans were completely tender all the way through, but not squishy and had a really pleasant texture. Salt to taste before serving.
WARNING: some kinds of beans (kidney beans especially) have toxins in them that need to be deactivated by boiling first. Do your research before doing this.
August 25th, 2010 at 10:25 pm
Gee, Adam. Thirty six hours to cook beans… But I like beans, so it’s tempting enough that I’ll grab a bag of black beans at the grocery store tomorrow to see what I think. The ice cubes are a smart idea.
August 26th, 2010 at 8:57 am
I’d check them after 24 – just squeeze the bag and you can tell if they’re done. Most of the recipes I’ve seen call for them to be cooked at 195F for much less time. I liked the way these came out. A similar experiment didn’t do so well with white beans – they went a kind of sickly brown color, halfway between the raw white bean color and baked beans. Not dark enough to be appetizing. They tasted ok, but looked really nasty.
August 26th, 2010 at 10:31 pm
I just dropped a small experimental batch in the SousVide Supreme. I checked Harold McGee’s “On Food and Cooking” and learned that dried beans absorb their own weight in water, so I rinsed 4 ounces of dried black beans, added 4 ounces of ice cubes and a bit of diced onion to the cooking bag. I wanted a weight measurement, rather than eyeballing equal volumes of beans and ice cubes. If I like the result, I’m going to try a larger batch using chicken stock instead of water. I’ll check for doneness at 24 hours.
August 26th, 2010 at 10:37 pm
How did that come out in terms of volume? Precision always helps of course, but I don’t think this needs to be exact as long as you err on the side of more – too little and they’ll be dry, but the only effect of having too much water in there would be some extra liquor at the end.