Use pea beans....wash a pound of beans and soak over night.
Discard soaking water and put into a pot add water to cover by about an inch or more, depending on if your pot is tall or short and wide.. Add a small onion halved and 1/2 pound of salt pork and simmer until the beans shed their skins when you put some into a spoon and blow on them. When that happens, they are done.
Get out your bean pot ( no an open casserole won't do!) and put in as many beans as it will hold, (Mine holds about 3/4 of the cooked beans)

add about 3 T dark molasses 1tsp Coleman's dry mustard, 1/4 cup brown sugar, about 2 or 3 tablespoons of catsup and slice up the salt pork and lay on top of the beans. Put the lid on the pot and bake at 300 or a little under for 4 to 6 hours. Save the rest of the beans and the broth and add broth as needed as the beans get drier. Periodically stick a long spoon down into the bean pot to stir from the bottom.....serve when you think they are ready.....and save any leftovers for me!

I discard the soaking water for beans too - I believe it makes them less 'gassy'. I use it to water my plants = )

I never soak and never drain the water. I dump a bag into the crockpot, add a couple of quarts of water and a diced onion and a couple of diced carrots, cook all day on low, add salt and pepper to taste before I eat them.

Mine are thick, not really like soup, so I don't drain them unless there is a lot of liquid. Then I add molasses, brown sugar, dry mustard and some catsup, just like LindaC. Add a couple of strips of bacon to the top and bake them until they are sticky.

My husbnd is from Tennessee and loves a "pot of beans" and I've converted him to my very easy and hands off way of making beans, whether they are navy beans, Great Northern, pinto or our homegrown "October" beans.

Annie

I've been using flageolet beans instead of navy/white northern the last couple of years for beans and ham and I soak them overnight in the refrigerator. Discard the soaking water, rinse briefly. I swear, these are gasless beans - but I don't know if the bean type itself or the soaking chilled overnight ;0)

I have a pressure cooker recipe that is pinto beans and pork, chilied, that's very good and those go into the pressure cooker dry. As much as we like it, and admitting it's much spicier, I may not want that one 3 days in a row - if that's not too much information.

I've recently been clearing out all the dried beans from my pantry. I haven't found much difference in cooking pintos, black eyed peas, turtle beans, flagollets, etc. If they're very dry, years old, they need to be soaked for a few days to cook through. If they're fresh dried, but still have a little moisture in the middle, they don't need to be soaked.

Soaking beans is more about sprouting them, which makes them more nutritious, but is a pain. Sprouted beans, even if they don't have tails yet, might be less gassy, which is where I think that comes from, but they could be sprouted and redried before cooking. Most of the gassy, so I've read, comes when people don't have enough fiber in their diets and then eat a bunch of beans.

I do a cursory rinse and sort, but I haven't found any rocks in the beans in the USA, with beans from grocery stores.

It's easier to cook beans in the oven than on the stove, but since I was given a multicooker, I've been using that. The crock pot was invented for making been stew. Slow cooking is ideal.

I always cook the beans first, then add the other ingredients once they're cooked. They seem to come out better that way.

I cook all beans (except black eyed peas) in the pressure cooker. Do not presoak. Always try to use the freshest beans that I can find. When I find new crop pintos, I load up on them and keep them in the freezer.

I agree with Plllog. If you have plenty of fiber in your diet, then beans won't make you gassy.

For baked beans, I make the cheater version starting with canned baked beans. I tried making them from scratch once and they didn't turn out nearly as good as the cheater version.

That said, I need to try making them from scratch again but I'll save that for a winter project.

My mom always made baked beans in a big batch in the roaster oven (Nesco roaster). The heat comes from the sides. I think that's true in a slow cooker, too. So if the pressure cooker isn't doing it for you, maybe change your method? It may take longer for the sugar to work its magic on the beans. I'm guessing that a dutch oven in the oven on convection only would work the same way, or even a big jar in an immersion bath.