Pinto beans prepped with a preboil and then slow cooked with onion, bacon and simple seasonings. Serve topped with onions, tomato relish, or pico de gallo with cilantro, if desired, and cornbread or warmed tortillas on the side. A perfect fit for refried beans too!
Slow Cooker Pinto Beans
Of course, beans have always been popular in the South and three beans reign supreme in the Deep South - red kidney beans used for our Monday red beans and rice, white beans generally prepared Cajun style with andouille sausage and more widely across the South in general, pinto beans, prepared Southern-Style.
In the Deep South we make our red beans and rice with red kidney beans, not the smaller more oval shaped red beans that are more popular in Texas, and yes, there is a difference!
For red beans, though I do love them long stewed and cooked on the stovetop the best, I have taken to using the Instant Pot the past few years, just because I'm such a poor advance "planner." For pintos, I have tended to always do those stovetop.
Today, I'm trying pintos in the slow cooker, but with some stovetop adjustments. I know, I know... yeah, you can dump everything in the slow cooker all at once and call it a day, literally, because it is probably going to take all day doing that.
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First question though... to soak or not to soak?
I have found that there is a wide gap between those who insist you must soak pintos and those that insist you don't need to. For red beans, I feel like those really do need to soak, but that ain't necessarily so for pintos. Some folks do. Some folks don't.
Personally, I am in the soak camp. Whether it's an overnight water soak, or a quick boil method, my personal experience is that it's necessary to hydrate the beans well so that they cook more uniformly, faster and resulting in a creamier textured bean. Plus, there's a bonus.
The soaking, draining and refreshing of the water appears to help reduce those annoying complex sugars and/or oligosaccharides that can cause digestive, well um, challenges. You know, that beans beans the musical fruit thing...
Then, the question is to salt or not to salt?
There have been many experiments with salting beans across the internet, attempting to dispel the notion that many folks live by that you shouldn't salt beans before they are cooked. Some of these tests declare that there is no difference and that salting ahead of cooking doesn't affect the beans at all. Others say that it can cause the beans to remain tough, harder to cook and taking a much longer time to soften.
While I think there are multiple factors that affect those hypothesis, my personal experience has been that salted beans produce a tougher bean that has to cook much longer, so generally speaking, I have always generally waited awhile after the beans have been cooking to salt them.
As they say, YMMV (you're mileage - aka experience - may vary).
I tried a slightly different method I ran across from several different YouTube videos with these Slow Cooker Pinto Beans and was extremely pleased with the outcome!
It involves a few steps before hitting the slow cooker:
- Starting with a hard boil
- Draining the beans and rinsing them, then refreshing the water
- Putting them into a second hard boil
- Being transferred to the slow cooker, with the second boil liquid and a few seasonings
- Cooking 3 to 4 hours on high or 5-6 hours on low.
Once the beans were in the slow cooker:
- I added 3 slices of raw bacon, cut in half
- 1 small raw onion, cut into fairly large chunks
- 1/2 stick of unsalted butter
- Kosher salt with pepper and garlic powder, or use a SPG salt, pepper and garlic blend (#ad)
- 1 teaspoon Creole/Cajun seasoning
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Yep. This method is not one of those dump and go slow cooker recipes.
Yep. This method requires a little bit of prep work.
Yep. I did not precook the vegetables or bacon and I added the seasonings at the beginning of the cooking time.
Totally against all of my bean rules! Rebel.
Because of the double hard boil prep:
- I found that when set on high the beans cooked faster and were done in under 3 hours, slightly longer than doing them fully on the stovetop, but requiring little monitoring. After they were done, I kept them on low for awhile.
- I found that this prep method resulted in finished beans that were perfectly tasty, tender and creamy and in our experience, zero gassiness.
Funny story I have to share with y'all. Having found my pantry depleted, I asked my husband, aka to y'all as The Cajun, to swing by the grocery store on his way home one day and pick up two bags of pinto beans. Well, he couldn't find single one pound bags, nevermind my preferred Camelia brand, and said that the bean shelves were wiped out. He came home with these beans pictured below, saying they were the only pinto beans in the whole of the store!
Y'all. These are 4 pound bags. Two 4 pound bags. So... I reckon we'll be eating up some pinto beans this over the coming months.
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Rinse, drain and pick through beans for stones or debris, then place into a large soup pot. I know I told y'all this was a slow cooker recipe, but I'm doing these a little bit different and doing a hard boil "soak" on the stovetop first.
I think this is advantageous for a number of reasons, including a creamier end result, but more importantly, it reduces those annoying gases that beans can cause.
Cover with water plus 2 inches
Bring to a hard boil and boil for 30 minutes, checking for water level periodically. Drain and rinse well.
Return beans to the pot.
Cover with fresh water plus 1-1/2 inches. Bring to a second hard boil and boil for 30 additional minutes
Since it's just one pound of beans, and since I'm doing this hard boil presoak, and since I'm cooking my beans on high, I thought the beans would do better in a 4-quart slow cooker (#ad), rather than a larger 6-quart.
To avoid cracking the crock, I suggest running it under hot water from the tap to warm it up, then drain it, before transferring the full pot of beans and all of the liquid from the second boil.
Add 3 strips of raw bacon strips, cutting them in half. Add the onion, top with a half stick of butter.
Add the salt, garlic and pepper.
Add the Creole or Cajun seasoning if using and stir it all together. I had picked up this Fiesta brand Pinto Bean Seasoning (#ad) awhile back, so I tossed some of that in too! There are a number of pinto bean seasonings out there. This brand contains garlic, onion, chili peppers, salt and unspecified spices.
Taste and adjust. Because this was my first time using this method and I wasn't sure how long it would take the beans to cook through, I just switched over to low then warm until we were ready to eat.
For more of my favorite bean recipes, check out this collection on my Pinterest page!
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