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Pressure Cooker Black Beans

Chop an onion, green pepper, and some garlic cloves. Tie up 2 chipotle peppers and some leftover meat scraps from smoked meat/barbeque in a cheesecloth bundle. Dissolve chicken bouillon in 5 - 6 cups water. Empty a one-pound bag of rinsed and sorted black beans into a pressure cooker. Add everything else. Select the longest/highest setting for beans on your pressure cooker. It takes about 10 minutes for the pressure cooker to achieve heat/pressure and it will take about another 10 minutes for it to cool down.
Print Recipe
Prep Time 12 minutes
Cook Time 45 minutes
Total Time 1 hour 10 minutes
Course: Main Course, Side Dish
Cuisine: Mexican
Ingredients Method Notes

Ingredients
  

  • 1 pound black beans rinsed and sorted
  • 1 onion chopped
  • 1 green pepper chopped
  • 3 cloves garlic minced
  • 2 jalapenos or 1 - 2 chipotle peppers and 1 - 2 of the adobo sauce
  • 2 fist sized hunks of leftover bones fat, or scraps from your last barbeque or your neighbor's smoked meats. (Totally optional. I have a friend who makes great smoked meats/sausages and it hurts me to see the scraps thrown away so they go into my freezer and await their second job of seasoning my beans.)
  • 5 - 6 cups liquid chicken, beef, veggie stock or water
  • 2 T Cumin
  • 1 T Dried Oregano
  • 1 T Kosher Salt
  • 1/2 tsp pepper

Method
 

  1. Rinse and sort 1 pound of black beans, put them in your pressure cooker. (You rinse the beans to get off the field dust and sort them because there could be small stones among the beans. I've only once found a small stone. This is a pleasurable step for people with OCD.)
  2. Add the chopped onion, chopped green pepper, minced garlic and some of the adobo sauce to the pressure cooker.
  3. Tie the meat scraps, 2 jalapenos or 2 chipotle peppers in adobo sauce, in a square of cheesecloth - you will be removing this stuff after cooking and it's easier when it's in a nice bundle.
  4. Put the cheesecloth bundle in the pressure cooker.
  5. Add your liquid of choice and give it a stir.
  6. Secure the lid of the pressure cooker and make sure the valve is set to "pressure" and not "steam."
  7. Select the 45-minute bean cycle. It will take about 5 minutes to get up to pressure and temperature. After cooking, let the pressure cooker return to atmospheric pressure naturally, meaning, don't open the steam valve on the top - just wait until the pressure number goes down to zero. That will take about 10 minutes.

Notes

Chipotle peppers in adobo sauce yield a deeper, smokier, richer flavor than fresh jalapeno peppers. Save the rest of the can in a glass container with a snap-on lid and refrigerate. They last forever stored that way. You add the powdered spices after the beans have cooked because it's easier to adjust the flavors. Also, cooking the spices under pressure sometimes imparts a harsh bitterness. If I could add only one thing to flavor the beans it would be the canned chipotle peppers in adobo sauce. Then I'd pick the cumin. 2 Tbs. of cumin might be too much for you. Start small and taste.