both the taste and texture of the cooked beans.
The alkalinity of baking soda can give an
unpleasantly slippery mouth feel and soapy
taste. And salt reduces the swelling and
gelation of starch granules within beans,
which means that it favors a mealy internal
texture over a creamy one.
Pressure Cooking Thanks to its temperature
of around 250ºF/120ºC, pressure cooking can
cut the cooking time of beans and peas by half
or more. Salt-presoaked beans may take just
10 minutes.
Persistently Hard Beans One problem that
cooks commonly encounter when cooking dry
beans is that some batches take unusually long
to soften, or never quite do soften. This may
have been caused by growing conditions on
the farm, or storage conditions after harvest.
“Hard-seed” is a characteristic found in
beans when temperatures are high and
humidity and water supply are low during the