How to Cook Any Kind of Beans in a Slow Cooker {Crock Pot}

Name: How to Cook Any Kind of Beans in a Slow Cooker
Prep time: 5 min
Cook time: 6 h
Total time: 6 h 5 min
Yield: 6
Ingredients: 16 ounces (1 lb) dried beans, any variety; 1 tbsp minced garlic; 1 tbsp onion powder; 1 tsp salt; 1 tsp pepper; 1/4 tsp baking soda; 2 tsp Worcestershire sauce or soy sauce; 8 cups (1892ml) water, or chicken or vegetable broth; Any other herbs and spices that you like (optional)

Modified: Sep 2, 2025 · Published: Apr 26, 2018 by Rebecca Blackwell · This post may contain affiliate links · 37 Comments

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Cooking dried beans in a slow cooker produces richly flavorful, tender beans that will save you money and taste better than anything you'll ever find in a can.

Don't get me wrong. Canned beans are great in a pinch. I use them often. But, with just a bit of foresight and about 5 minutes of prep work, you can have a pot full of slow simmered beans, flavored with whatever spices you like.

Have an Instant Pot? Here's how to cook any kind of beans in the Instant Pot.

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Beans Really are a Wonder Food

Slowly cooking dried beans makes them creamy, flavorful, and delicious. Plus, they're inexpensive, incredibly versatile, high in fiber and protein, low in sugar, fat, and sodium, and full of slow-burning complex carbohydrates, making them one of my favorite long shelf life pantry foods.

Do You Really Need to Soak Beans Before Cooking?

Cooking dried beans is a highly underrated endeavor. Canned beans are a fabulous luxury of the modern age and I almost always have a few cans in the pantry. BUT - cooking dried beans only takes about 5 minutes of prep work, costs a fraction as much as canned, and taste markedly more delicious.

The best thing about cooking dried beans is that you have the opportunity to add herbs, spices, garlic and onions to them while they cook, infusing the beans will all that flavor. Also, the texture of cooked dried beans is much, much better than anything that ever comes out of a can.

The only drawback to cooking dried beans is that the require a bit of forethought. Most recipes, this one included, call for soaking the beans in water overnight. While there's nothing difficult or time consuming about dumping some beans into a bowl and covering them with water, it does require you to remember to soak them.

But, is soaking the beans necessary? And what do you do if you forget to soak them?

Soaking white beans before cooking them.

Soaking beans before cooking does three things:

It reduces the cooking time
Creates a better texture for the cooked beans, with fewer split-open and burst beans
It makes them a bit more digestible

If you don't soak your beans ahead of time, they will still cook. But, you'll need to extend the cooking time by about 2 hours. (Sometimes it can take even longer, especially if the beans are old.)

A bowl of white bean soup on a table, ready to serve.

This Recipe Will Work with Most Kinds of Beans

This is a general recipe that works for pretty much any kind of dried bean except for split peas and lentils. Use all one type of bean or mix a few different ones together.

The recipe makes a lot of cooked beans - about 6-7 cups. You can certainly cut the recipe in half. But, I've found that it's not that difficult to use 6 or 7 cups of beans in different dishes throughout the week. If there are any leftover, they freeze beautifully and are great to have on hand.

A bowl of vegetarian chili on a table, ready to serve with fresh pico de gallo.

Incorporate whatever flavors you like

Planning to make some chili, tostadas, nachos, or burritos this week? Add some chili power, cumin, and oregano.

Check out this recipe for From Scratch Black Beans that incorporates all of those flavors and more.

Perhaps you're in the mood for Italian or Mediterranean flavors. Add some rosemary, thyme, oregano, basil, and crushed red pepper.

Making some middle eastern or Indian dishes? Toss in some allspice, cardamom, cinnamon, cloves, coriander, cumin, and dried chilies.

No matter what, I like to add some garlic and onion powder. After that, anything goes.

And for the best pork and beans ever, make slow cooker pork belly the day before and then add tender pieces of pork to your pot of beans towards the end of cooking. So good!

What's the Difference Between a Slow Cooker and a Crock Pot?

A Crock-Pot is a type of slow cooker. So does that mean they are essentially the same thing?

Well, no. Not exactly.

While a Crock-Pot is a type of slow cooker, not every slow cooker is a Crock-Pot. Crock-Pots include a stoneware pot that is surrounded by a heating element.

The term "slow cooker" simply refers to the type of appliance, not the brand. Besides Crock-Pot, there are several other cooking brands that make slow cookers, like Cuisinart.

What's the Difference Between a Slow Cooker and an Instant Pot?

Slow Cookers are appliances that do one basic thing: they cook food slowly at a low temperature. Cooking food slowly in a slow cooker is convenient because you can set it early in the day and then just forget about it until later that evening when you want to eat.

The Instant Pot is a brand name for a multicooker. As you might guess, a multicooker is an appliance that does many things. Even though it can do several things, the primary way most of us use an Instant Pot is to quickly pressure cook food.

Instant Pots work by using pressure to raise the boiling point of water. This allows you to cook things like beans more quickly. If you'd rather cook beans quickly, here's how to cook beans in an Instant Pot.

The cool thing about Instant Pots is that most of them also have a slow cooker setting. I love this option when I'm cooking dried beans.

If I'm going to be out all day, I tend to use the slow cooker option to cook beans while I go about my day. If I want beans to be ready in just a couple of hours, I use the pressure cooker option.

Popular Recipes that use Slow Cooker Beans

I make a pot of Costa Rican beans and rice nearly every week. We use them to make quick breakfast tacos and eat them as a side dish with pretty much anything else we're eating that week. They are so, so good!

Three of my other favorite ways to use cooked beans is to toss them into a pot of 30-minute rotisserie chicken soup, use them to make these loaded vegan nachos, and these crispy corn tortilla quesadillas. All three recipes are also a great way to use up all kinds of leftovers or those random veggies rolling around in your crisper, so it's a win-win all the way around.

Here are other ways to use cooked beans:

If you give this recipe a try, let me know! Scroll down to rate the recipe and leave a comment for me!

📖 Recipe

Yield: 6-7 cups

How to Cook Any Kind of Beans in a Slow Cooker

Slow cooker beans take about 4 hours on high and 6 hours on low. This is a general recipe that works for pretty much any kind of dried bean except for split peas and lentils. Use all one type of bean or mix a few different ones together.

Have an Instant Pot? Here's how to cook any kind of beans in the Instant Pot.

Cooking Black Beans? Try this recipe for cooking Black Beans in a Slow Cooker or on the Stovetop.

Prep Time 5 minutes

Cook Time 6 hours

Total Time 6 hours 5 minutes

Ingredients

16 ounces (1 lb) dried beans, any variety
1 tablespoon minced garlic
1 tablespoon onion powder
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon pepper
¼ teaspoon baking soda
2 teaspoon Worcestershire sauce or soy sauce
8 cups (1892ml) water, or chicken or vegetable broth
Any other herbs and spices that you like (optional)

Instructions

It's important to prepare dried beans by soaking them in water before cooking - see information in the post above for more about why this is important.

To soak beans in water overnight:

Rinse beans in a colander set in the sink, then place in a large bowl and cover with water. Put the beans in the refrigerator to let soak for up to 24 hours. Drain and rinse the beans.

Quick-Soak method:

Rinse beans in a colander set in the sink, then put them in a saucepan and cover with water. Set the pan over high heat, bring the water to a boil; let boil for 2 minutes. Remove the pan from the heat, cover, and let the beans soak for 1 hour.

To cook the beans:

Pour beans into a colander and rinse in the sink for a minute or so. Pour into your slow cooker.
Add remaining ingredients plus 8 cups water, or chicken or vegetable broth. Stir to combine, put the lid on the slow cooker and let cook for 4 hours on high or 6 hours on low.

Notes

Chickpeas are a part of the legume family but aren't actually beans. You can follow this method to cook chickpeas in the slow cooker, but they will cook much faster - about 1 hour on high and 2 hours on low.

It's important that the liquid reaches the boiling point during cooking.

One reader brought up the importance of cooking beans at a high enough temperature for the liquid to boil (see her comment below), and I thought her point was important enough to deserve some additional commentary.

All legumes and most grains have high amounts of a natural compound called lectins, which can be toxic in high doses and red kidney beans have the highest amount of it.

In most cases, lectins are killed off during the soaking and cooking process. If you follow the method described in this recipe to soak the beans, discard the soaking liquid and give the beans a rinse, then cook them all the way through, you should be good.

The one caveat is if your slow cooker, when set to “low”, doesn’t cook at a high enough temperature to bring the liquid to a boil.

Most slow cookers will eventually bring the contents to a boil even when set on the lowest setting. However, I imagine there might be exceptions.

If the low setting on your slow cooker does not bring the liquid in the pot to a simmer, turn the temperature up. The beans need to cook in liquid that has reached the boiling point in order to ensure that any lectins are killed off.