I made some refried beans in a slow cooker, loosely following the recipe from my cookbook. The recipe says to cook the beans with ½ teaspoon of salt. Is this necessary to properly cook the beans? I am starting from dry beans.
I actually used ½ tbsp of soy sauce instead of plain salt and the beans tasted fine, but I would rather add no salt or soy sauce.
I see from this question that salt can affect the softness of the beans, but it seems like the beans should soften eventually either way. Since I am making refried beans, I only need the beans to soften enough for me to break them apart with a hand mixer, and then I can continue cooking them until they’re ready.
This post at the New York Times only discusses using salt to add flavor to the beans, but I am not worried about that. If I make a salt-free batch of beans and don’t like the taste, I can always go back to adding salt next time.
So will the beans cook properly in a slow cooker without adding salt?
Best Answer
Yes. In fact, many, many people believe (falsely) that adding salt before or during cooking will keep beans hard (a myth addressed in your first link), and most of these people have been cooking perfectly good beans for many years without adding salt until the beans were fully cooked.
The cooking time may vary slightly. In some circumstances, the texture of the beans and/or their skins may soften at somewhat different rates than with salt. But the beans will still cook fine.
(One note: some chefs have claimed that cooking beans without salt causes people to add even more salt afterward to create a flavor that tastes "properly salted." Beans are generally enhanced by adding flavoring components early enough in cooking for the flavors to penetrate. But you can always add salt afterward too; the resulting flavor distribution will just be different.)