Crock Pot 15 Bean Soup Recipe - Ham and Beans Soup (2024)

FAQs

How to thicken up 15 bean soup? ›

Add Flour Or Cornstarch

You can thicken soup by adding flour, cornstarch, or another starchy substitute. For the best results, never add flour or cornstarch directly to your soup. If you do, it will clump up on top. Instead, ladle a small amount of broth into a separate bowl and let it cool.

In a small bowl, mix cornstarch with cold water to create a slurry. Gradually add the slurry to the soup while stirring continuously. Allow the soup to simmer for a few more minutes until thickened.

Soak beans in a three-to-one ratio of water to beans [source: What's Cooking America]. There are two basic ways to cook beans in your crock pot, one with a quick soak and one with a long soak. For the quick-soak method: Boil 6 cups of water and one teaspoon salt.

I freeze them in two-cup portions, which makes it easy to pull out just what I need for a recipe. With beans made in the slow cooker, pre-soaking them is far less important than with other cooking methods. The long cooking time means that those beans will definitely soften!

Ham and Bean Soup with canned beans is an easy bean soup recipe that's thick, hearty, and made with minimal ingredients.

Cornstarch, potato starch, and chickpea flour are a couple of pantry-friendly ways to thicken soups, stews, and sauces in the slow cooker. Just a tablespoon or two of any — added towards the end of cooking — will thicken sauces especially well.

Ham and bean soup thickens primarily due to the breakdown of the beans as they cook, releasing starches into the broth, which helps to create a thicker consistency. Additionally, some recipes may call for mashing some of the beans or adding a roux (a mixture of fat and flour) to further thicken the soup.

To cut down on the gassy properties, you can add a little baking soda to your recipe. The baking soda helps break down some of the beans' natural gas-making sugars. I tested this while fixing one of my favorite slow cooker recipes: red beans and sausage.

Turn cooker to HIGH and cook beans until they're tender and cooked through, about 5-6 hours for unsoaked beans. (You can also cook the unsoaked beans on low, which would take about twice as long.) Drain beans.

Turns out cooking dried red kidney beans and cannellini beans in your slow cooker can make you sick. Find out how to eliminate the toxin that can make you ill and how to safely prepare and cook these commonly used legumes.

Do you cook beans in a crock pot on high or low? ›

Cook on low for 8 hours. When beans are cool you can package them in zip lock bags. 1 2/3 cups equals about a can's worth.

Place soaked beans in crock pot. Add any seasonings: salt and pepper, garlic, jalapenos, onions (to taste). Cover with water by about 2 inches. Cook on low for 8 hours or high for 6 hours.

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.

Starch it up with potatoes

You can also cook things like rice, small pasta like ditalini, or quinoa directly in your soup. The starch released in the cooking process will help thicken the soup. If you don't have any of these on hand, a can or two of beans, unrinsed, added to the soup will do the trick.

You can add a pinch of flour to thicken the sauce. Add a thickener. Depending on your requirements, you can use a roux*, some potato flour, tapioca flour, some (but not solely) tomato paste or xanthan gum (a corn-derived thickener) to bind up some of the extra liquid and give body to your sauce.