Until I went off to college and became a vegetarian out of financial necessity, beans really weren’t a part of my life. But once I found myself pinching pennies while sharing a house with three other ...

For tender, intact beans, this reliable method cannot be beat.

Making baked beans from scratch isn’t fast, but it is easy. Though the dry beans do need to be soaked overnight, then baked for a couple hours, actual hands-on cooking time is just about 15 minutes.

Cooking beans from scratch seems to be wreathed in controversy, although I’m not entirely sure why. First of all, while I know that canned beans are readily available, they really aren’t worth using, ...