THE flavor and texture that properly cooked dried beans bring to the table make the canned stuff feel like child’s play. The skins are intact and firm, and when you bite into them, the insides are smooth and flavorful. But dried beans are a little bit more of a commitment to make, seeing as they’re dried. A lot of recipes will tell you that soaking beans overnight is non-negotiable, but is that really the case? Do you really need to wait that long to eat marvelous, tasty beans?

Soaking beans in the refrigerator overnight will reduce the time they have to cook drastically. And the texture of the beans will also be at their best, with fewer split-open and burst ones.

Beans that have not been soaked ahead of time will always take longer to cook, but they will, indeed, cook. Timing aside, sometimes we actually like to cook beans straight from dry. The reason for doing so when making certain soups is that the liquid that they’re cooked in becomes a delicious broth. If you start by building flavor in the bottom of a large stock pot by sweating aromatics and chopped vegetables, you can add spices, water, and finally beans to build a satisfying broth over time.

And by “over time,” we mean at least a couple of hours. Cooking your beans from dry means you’ll need to simmer those beans gently, patiently, stirring them every 30 minutes or so to make sure they’re cooking evenly and releasing flavor and starchy beaniness into liquid they’re simmering in.

When your beans are tender (but still maintain their shape), it’s time to season them. Adding salt to the cooking liquid and letting the beans sit for at least a half hour is the best way to make sure your beans are properly seasoned. Beans can take a lot of salt.

So it really all comes down to where you want to spend your time. If you have a couple of hours to kill, go ahead and make a pot of bean soup with the dried fellas. If you don’t need soup until tomorrow, let them hang out in a bowl of water overnight — they’ll be tender in about half the time. But either way, make a big batch. Beans and bean-y soups last at least a week in the fridge.(SD-Agencies)