You Can Prepare Beans In Your Rice Cooker — Here's How

We've compiled a list of tips for cooking beans from scratch that clearly states our position that it's certainly worth the effort. While you can stick to the stove top method, your rice cooker is a more efficient appliance that you can use to prepare beans. In fact, it can serve as a soaking container and cooker in one. Start by soaking beans in your rice cooker, adding a ratio of one cup of beans to three cups of water. You can leave them overnight in the rice cooker covered with its lid without connecting it to an outlet to prep the beans for cooking the next day.

Then, drain the soaking water from the beans and refill the rice cooker vessel with four cups of fresh water. Run a cycle on the rice cooker, refresh the beans with more water, and run a final cycle. Using a rice cooker to cook beans tends to take around an hour and a half. However, cooking times can vary depending on the type of beans that you use, the quantity of beans in your batch, and the type of rice cooker you own. 

If you're looking for a new one, check out our favorite rice cookers here. The rice cooker is a great alternative to a slow cooker because it'll save you time. It may take the same amount of time as the stovetop method, but the rice cooker is a lot more controlled and efficient at getting the cooking temperature just right.

Many of the same tips for stove-top beans from scratch apply to rice-cooker beans. You'll still need to clean and remove any debris from dried beans before soaking them. You can swap water for a more flavorful broth, like this chicken broth from Pacific Foods, to upgrade the taste of the beans. Rice cookers like this one from Tiger have long porridge settings that can cook beans in one cycle. For basic rice cookers, a cycle for white rice is 20 to 30 minutes and a cycle for brown rice is 30 to 40 minutes. Whichever rice cooker you have at home, you should stick to a maximum of 2 cups of beans per batch, as they'll expand considerably once cooked.

Another tip to aid in the digestion of beans is to add a bay leaf to the cooking liquid. Apart from imparting a savory, earthy flavor to the cooking liquid, bay leaves contain enzymes that help eliminate the notoriously gassy components in beans. Bay leaves will pair well with garbanzos and all manner of white beans. For the black and pinto beans that you might use in Mexican cuisine, try epazote, a Mexican crop with the same gas-eliminating enzymes as bay leaves and a uniquely delicious flavor. Once you've finished making beans in the rice cooker, you can add a cup back in with some white or brown rice to cook into a classic recipe like the Southern specialty, Hoppin' John or Costa Rican gallo pinto.