How To Cook Pinto Beans

Hi there. I'm Matt from the Underground Cookery School, and today, I'm going to do a video cookery lesson for you. What I was going to show you today is how to make pinto beans or how to cook them, rather, because they grow.

What happens is once they've been harvested, you know, they're harvested in India and loads of them everywhere, what they do is they dry them out and so we need to reconstitute them before doing anything else, before the actual cooking process. So, I'm going to take these beans that look like that and I'm just going to cover them in water. Now, you really need to do this overnight.

There is a little trick. You can add baking powder or bicarbonate soda to the water and that speeds the process up. But normally, about 8 to 10 hours should do it and we obviously don't have that sort of time.

So, here are some I reconstituted last night. Well, I'm just going to pass them through. You'll see the volume is about twice that of the dried version and what I'm now going to do is just add these beans – let me just grab my tea towel.

I'm going to add these through some boiling water. Now, what you can do, if you like, is you can blanch them in cold water and when the water comes up to the boil, just skim off all the impurities that come up to the top. Part of the water, refresh and cover but for the purposes of this demonstration, I'm just going to put them in boiling water and these will typically – I mean, cooking times really vary.

These will probably take about 25 to 30 minutes. So, sometimes if the beans are really dried, they can take an hour and a half, so my advice is when cooking pinto beans, what you should always do is just keep tasting them until you're happy. So, we're going to leave those on.

I'm going to turn the heat down a bit now, let them simmer away and when you come back in about 25 minutes time, this should be ready. It's been about 25 minutes and I would say, well, actually I know because I checked, these beans are done. So, through, they go.

Look at that, perfect. And now, I'm just going to plate up. Just looking for my big spoon which isn't there, but it doesn't matter whenever I need it because I'm a professional.

Just a little drizzle of olive oil – oh yes, we always like that. The base for any dish is, I think, any savoury dish anyway. And there we have how to cook pinto beans. .