cooking dried beans - did I just screw this up?

[dana203]

Hi, I have a dumb, newbie question. I'm trying to cook more food from scratch and today I decided to use the Bittman quick soak method to cook up a pound of dried pinto beans. Bittman says put the beans in a pot with some water, bring to a boil about 2 minutes, turn off the heat and then let it sit, covered, for about 2 hours. I set it to boil and kind of forgot about my pot of beans, so they boiled for um, much longer than 2 minutes. More like 10 minutes. Oops.

So, now they are all wrinkly, already a little soft. Did I totally screw up my beans? Should I just start over or will these things be edible?

Sorry for the dumb question, but google failed my on searches for "over boiled dry beans."

Thanks in advance!

[Big Daddy's House]

Hi, Dana203.

No, you DIDN'T screw up.

At that point, just go on and let them cook normally. Add a pinch of baking soda. The beans WILL EVENTUALLY be
cooked and softened enough in a few hours.

Or if you have a pressure cooker, this will help the beans cook in about half the time that it would take cooking them the normal way.

Good luck!