help! cooking beans

[Solose]

i wanted to make chili in a crockpot. the rice calls for starting with canned beans and cooking for 8 hours. i am starting with dried beans. Usually I cook them for 8 hours anyway, can I just throw them in the pot at the beginning and expect them to cook with the chili? Should I precook them first? I was thinking of precooking maybe 4 hours and then cooking them 8 hours with the chili.

[avendesora]

Cooking beans in acid (tomatoes) or salt will keep them from softening. I'd recommend cooking them separately first. Adding the tomatoes and salt once the beans are soft enough will keep them from getting overly soft.

Aven

[noobmom]

Some beans need to be partially cooked before being added to a crockpot. Red kidney beans are one of them. My crockpot instructions specifically state that kidney beans should be boiled in a separate pot and the water discarded and replaced with fresh water before adding them to the crockpot.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_bean

Toxicity

Before they are eaten, the raw bean seeds should be soaked in water for several hours and then boiled for at least ten minutes in new fresh water to degrade a toxic compound - the lectin phytohaemagglutinin - found in the bean which would otherwise cause severe gastric upset. This compound is present in many varieties (and in some other species of bean), but is especially concentrated in red kidney beans and white kidney beans (Cannellini beans). Although in the case of dry beans the ten minutes required to degrade the toxin is much shorter than the hours required to fully cook the beans themselves, outbreaks of poisoning have been associated with the use of slow cookers whose low cooking temperatures may be unable to degrade the toxin. Sprouts of pulses high in haemaglutins should not be eaten. Kidney beans, especially, should not be soaked or sprouted.[1][2]