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I bought some dried red beans from the supermarket. I learned that in order to cook them well, I need more time. I have to soak them in cold water for one night, then cook for another two or three hours.
Are there any tips or tricks to cook them faster?
If you want to reduce total preparation time, you can skip the soak. Then you can just boil for about 4-6 hours, instead of soaking overnight. This is not a tradeoff most cooks are willing to make, since it wastes quite a bit of energy, and reduces the taste qualities of the prepared beans somewhat.
If you want it even faster, as weets mentioned, pressure cooking is the way to go. Then you can get away with about 45-50 minutes for unsoaked and 25 minutes for soaked beans - that's the time spent at pressure, the total time will depend on the warming up time, which differs with pressure cooker type and total amount of beans you are cooking at once. The same preference for soaked beans applies with pressure cooking.
If these times don't work for you, you cannot reduce them, but you can switch to buying canned beans. The disadvantages there are the higher cost, higher storage volume, and the fact that some brands have off tastes.
What is the dish you are trying to make?
If you are looking to soften the beans quickly you can use a pressure cooker.
You can soak it for 45 minutes in warm or simmering water. When that happens you'll end up with a lot of indigestible sugars in the water so you'll want to pour that off and then boil them in water. I think you'll end up with more indigestible sugars in the water after that so you'll want to pour those off too and then you can get into a 2-3 hour cook time. When you finish that they should be edible, but they won't be soft. They'll come out with a bit of bite.
There are a couple of things you can do to drastically reduce even this cooking time. The first is that you can cook what gets sold at walmart and other places as lentils. This don't require pre-soaking and can be cooked in like 45 minutes. You can also use a pressure cooker or an instant pot. This will allow you to cook at higher temperatures, but it won't do anything about the pre-soak time. The most effective thing you can do to reduce cook time would be to buy canned beans. Canned beans are a lot less cost effective when it comes to calories per pound/gram, but you save an absolute ton of time since the beans are already cooked.
I typically just put the beans in some water in the fridge to soak them on the week I know I want to cook them. That generally gives them enough time to pre-soak properly and it prevents them from growing if I don't cook them the next day. Generally speaking if you want to cook dried beans, you're going to have to do something like this.
You can also just cook the beans till they're soft. I know that works with chickpeas. I feel like I get better results when I pre-soak though.
I generally just do a 10 minute boil, 1 hour rest, then simmer for 15-2 hours. But this blogpage suggests that you don't even need the resting period. Essentially her trick is to avoid packaged dried beans and use the bulk beans available in some stores. No idea where that would be in my area, but... How to Cook Dried Beans - The Quick and Easy Method
