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Today is national bean day!

Forgive me for what may seem like undue excitement about beans. As a frugal vegetarian, I happen to love those little dicots.

Lately I’ve been craving big bowls of beans, platters of refried beans, and salads heaped with beans. Give me all the beans!

But, as much as I enjoy the many forms of legumes, they aren’t exactly a readily available food item.

Sure, you can buy them just about anywhere for a price that makes your budget smile. But then you have to cook them until they transform into creamy, starchy nuggets.

Back in the day I cooked mountains of beans in the slow cooker and then froze them in quart bags. It was an all-day affair, and though I enjoyed feeling like Laura Ingalls Wilder, it was not my favorite way to spend Sunday.

Then came the Instant Pot. I was a little slow to jump on the Instant Pot bandwagon, mostly because I didn’t know what it was. Kevin and I bought one for our 4 year anniversary, and bean cooking got drastically easier.

What once took 6-12 hours now took 1 hour. I no longer had to plan days ahead to eat beans.

There was one last roadblock to my bean cooking game though. I could pack about 4 cups of cooked beans into a quart freezer bag, but once that bag of beans was frozen, I had a solid bean block on my hands.

Of course I didn’t think ahead enough to thaw the beans before I needed them, so it was quite the feat to extract the frozen bean brick from the bag. I try to save bags (I’m not the only one; Stephanie does it too) so it bothered me that I was destroying perfectly good freezer bags.

Then I remembered the concept of flash freezing.

Now, I use my InstantPot to cook up a whole mess of beans. It takes even less time now that we live at a lower elevation than we did in Colorado.

After the beans are cooked and cooled, I spread them out in a thin layer on a parchment-lined jelly roll pan and freeze them. You could also line the pan with one of these so that it’s reusable. They don’t take long to freeze, though if we’re honest here I will tell you I usually forget about them for a few days.

After they have frozen on the pan, I break them up and put them in a gallon freezer bag. Now they are loose like frozen peas, so you can use just what you need when you need to. It’s wonderful, and it makes it a lot easier to actually eat those protein-packed, fiber-filled delights.

A couple of notes on cooking beans in the Instant Pot.

First of all, I don’t bother soaking beans before cooking. The Instant Pot can cook beans so quickly that soaking really isn’t necessary.

Second, salt the cooking water. You don’t have to go crazy here, just use a teaspoon or so. Beans cooked in salt water end up needing less total salt than beans cooked in plain water. When cooking beans on the stovetop or in a slow cooker, I never salted the water because the beans would remain crunchy even after hours and hours of cooking. I’ve never had that problem in the Instant Pot.

At this point you may be wondering why I don’t just buy canned beans. They’re cheap too, right?

Well, yes, especially if you compare them pound for pound with another protein source (like beef). But after reading this post I realized that canned beans are kind of expensive for what they are. I also find it harder to keep ~10 cans of each type of bean around for all my recipes.

Whether you cook your own beans, eat them out of the can, or only enjoy them at restaurants, I hope you make sure to enjoy some beans on national bean day!