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I'm a teen trying to cook for himself and I wanted to make some red beans and rice.

After I boiled the water, I started soaking the red beans and in just 5-8 minutes, the beans pruned up like your fingers in bath.

I got so scared (I still am), because I think I did something wrong because my grandmothers red beans never looked like that. (At least when I ate them.)

My mother got the beans from a free food place and they've been in the cabinet for a few months now.

The beans:

2 lbs (900 g) of Morrison Farms light red kidney beans in 8 cups of boiled water.

The boiled water has 1/4 cup of kosher salt dissolved.

Peter Mortensen
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crash15
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2 Answers2

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It's normal for beans to sometimes do that during the first stages of soaking, particularly if you soak them in boiling water. They should plump up and become normal after 40min to an hour.

FuzzyChef
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Quote from Bon Appetit:

After soaking, the beans should be BIG—they'll have absorbed much of the water. If they don't change in size, or are visibly wrinkly or shriveled, your beans are probably too old. If it seems like just a few of the beans are wrinkled, pick them out and proceed.

If it’s the whole pot, start over with fresh beans or buckle in for a looooong, slow cook—and add a pinch of baking soda: The baking soda increases the pH of the liquid (the opposite effect of adding acid to the mix!), naturally making the beans more tender.

Backing up the quote, old beans do take longer to cook, and when they are too old, they may stay tough and chewy even after they simmer for hours.

So the conclusion is, if our beans remain wrinkly after soaking overnight, it just might be a case of them being too old. Given that at the time you've only soaked them for less than 10 minutes, I'd say they were probably okay and simply needed to soak longer.

Anastasia Zendaya
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