Last week, I decided to make a batch of turkey chili. My younger sister and a friend of hers were staying with us and I figured chili was a easy way to cover at least one dinner and lunch the next day. I put a pound of beans in to soak overnight and then the next morning, popped them into a slow cooker. At lunchtime, I ran home to get the rest of the chili ready, browning ground turkey with some chopped onions and breaking up a can of whole peeled tomatoes.
I poured the meat and veggies into a different slow cooker and added the partially cooked beans and their cooking liquid, figuring that they would soften the rest of the way over the course of the afternoon (experienced dried been cookers may have already spotted my mistake). Except that when I got home later that night, the beans were still crunchy. We waited an hour more, and but they never got soft. We ended up picking every bean out of the chili by hand and then adding in a couple of cans of beans, in order to create a dinner we could eat.
Later that night, as I beat myself up for ruining dinner, I flipped through the Rancho Gordo Cookbook, trying to figure out where I had gone wrong. Suddenly, I found the illuminating passage. It explained that you should never add high acid foods to beans before they are fully cooked, as the acids will arrest the cooking process and so you'll end up with crunchy, undercooked beans. Just my problem. I still felt bad about having screwed up dinner, but I also felt grateful to have figured out why my beans has been so terrible. It's one mistake I won't make again.
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