Instant Pot Cowboy Beans

Instant Pot Cowboy Beans are a meal-in-a-pot with bacon, ground beef, pinto beans, onions, peppers, and spices. This recipe is fantastic when made with dry pinto beans, which cook much faster in an Instant Pot or other pressure cooker.

Jump to:

• Ingredient Notes and Substitutions
• Cooking Instant Pot Cowboy Beans in pictures
• Sort and rinse the dry pinto beans
• Instant Pot Cowboy Beans Recipe
• What to serve with Cowboy Beans
• Frequently Asked Questions
• Scaling
• Sorting and Rinsing Dry Pinto Beans
• Do You Need to Soak The Pinto Beans Before Pressure Cooking?
• Tips and Tricks
• Storage
• Related Posts
• 💬 Comments

Pinto beans are one of my favorites to pressure cook. So, when I saw recipes for cowboy beans, loaded with bacon, beef, chili powder, and barbecue sauce, I knew I had to try them.

It took a few attempts to get the beans to soften because the sugary, acidic barbecue sauce was slowing them down. But with a little extra pressure cooking time, and some baking soda to counter the acid in the barbecue sauce, they are ready to serve as a one-pot meal, or a (very) hearty side dish at a barbecue.

Now, what's the difference between these beans and a beef-and-bean chili? Not much other than the flavors. Chili is more pepper-forward - more chili powder - where these beans are sweeter, thanks to the barbecue sauce.

Ingredient Notes and Substitutions

• Heat level: The heat level in these beans depends on the chili powder blend and chopped green chiles. Most store-bought varieties of both are mild heat, so there will not be much heat in the recipe. If you want to up the spice level to medium, look for hot, chopped green chiles, or substitute 2 minced fresh jalapeños. Or add ½ teaspoon of cayenne pepper with the chili powder. (Or do both if you want hot beans.)
• Other beans: Black beans, small red beans, and navy beans will all cook about the same as the pinto beans in this recipe. You can substitute them without any changes. If you want to use kidney beans or great northern beans, you need to soak them, because Kidney and great northern beans take longer to cook than the others. Soak the beans overnight, then change the pressure cooking time to 25 minutes at high pressure.
• Other meat: As long as you use a lean meat, you can substitute any ground meat you want in this recipe. 70/30 lean-to-fat "ground beef" is a little too fatty for my tastes in this recipe. Anything 80/20 or leaner will work. Or, use a different meat - ground pork, ground turkey, and ground chicken all work in this recipe. (You can even use game meat - ground venison, elk, and buffalo are all great too.)
• Calico beans: Mix up 1 pound of one or more of the following dry beans: pinto beans, black beans, small red beans, and navy beans. They all cook in about the same amount of time, so the pressure cooking time doesn't change.
• Mexican Charros Beans: Substitute Chorizo for the ground beef, use a diced fresh jalapeno instead of the canned green chiles
• Barbecue sauce: I partial to my own easy homemade barbecue sauce, but store-bought sauce will work just fine in this recipe. I like a smoky Texas-style sauce, like Stubbs Original BBQ Sauce.
• Make-Ahead Beans or Canned Beans: If you have 6 cups of cooked pinto beans, or 4 15-ounce cans of beans from the grocery store, you can do a shortcut version of this recipe. Skip sorting the dry beans (obviously), then brown the bacon, sauté the aromatics and toast the spices, and cook the beef until it loses its pink color and is broken up. Add 2 cups of water, the cooked beans, and the barbecue sauce. (If you have homemade beans, include the bean liquid; if you have store-bought beans, drain them before adding them to the pot.) Pressure cook for 15 minutes with a Natural Pressure Release. Stir in the ½ teaspoon of fresh ground black pepper, and you are ready to serve.

Cooking Instant Pot Cowboy Beans in pictures

Sort and rinse the dry pinto beans

Sort through the pinto beans, removing any broken beans, stones, or clumps of dirt. Rinse the beans and set them aside.

Brown the bacon in the pot

Brown the diced bacon in an Instant Pot set to Sauté mode-high, then scoop the bacon onto a paper-towel lined plate. Pour out the bacon fat, and add 2 tablespoons back to the pot.

Sauté the aromatics and toast the spices

Add the diced onion to the pot and sauté until softened, about 5 minutes. Add the garlic and spices and toast the spices for 1 minute.

Cook the ground beef

Stir the ground beef into the onions and spices. Cook the beef, stirring and breaking up any clumps of beef, until the beef loses its pink color, about 5 minutes.

Beans and liquid into the pot

Add the sorted and rinsed beans, and pour in the water. Pour the barbecue sauce on top and gently stir it in - we don't want it to sink to the bottom.

Pressure cook for 45 minutes with a Natural Release

Pressure cook on high for 45 minutes with a natural pressure release. If you have the time, simmer the beans for 15 minutes on Saute mode - Low to thicken the broth. Stir in some fresh ground pepper, serve, and enjoy!

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What to serve with Cowboy Beans

Cowboy beans are a meal in a pot. I like to serve them with cornbread or dinner rolls, and a salad or green vegetable side. (My Barbecued Frozen Corn is another great side for this.)

Frequently Asked Questions

• Why use dry beans? Isn't it quicker to throw a can of pork and beans in there and be done with it? Well, yes, but dry beans taste so much better. And, because dry beans are quick in a pressure cooker, I don't
• Why baking soda? The acid in the barbecue sauce slows down the softening of the beans. The baking soda counters the acid in the beans, and I'm pressure cooking the beans longer than normal - 45 minutes at high pressure. (Normally, I do 40 minutes with a quick release.) The extra time pressure cooking, and the pressure naturally coming down helps tenderize the beans.
• Why simmer after pressure cooking? Pressure cooking doesn't allow evaporation because of the sealed cooker. The simmering step isn't mandatory, but I like to do it when I can to thicken up the bean broth.
• Sorting, rinsing and soaking? That seems like a lot of work. I get asked these two questions so often that I've broken them out into their own sections...keep reading.
• Should I cook the beans first, then add the other ingredients? I don't think you should. This is a technique I saw in other recipes - par-cooking the beans, then adding in the other cooked ingredients. I think this is an unnecessary step - in my testing, adding a little extra pressure cooking time and a little baking soda took care of any problems the acidic ingredients might cause. (Now, as always, there is no "one true way" in cooking - if you have success with two-part pressure cooking, I won't try to stop you.)

Scaling

This recipe scales up and down easily - cut everything in half if you don't need as many beans, or have a 3-quart or 4-quart pressure cooker. Scaling up runs into space issues; you need an 8-quart pressure cooker to double this recipe.

Sorting and Rinsing Dry Pinto Beans

Pinto beans are an agricultural product, and stuff tends to creep in during processing. Beans should always be sorted to remove any twigs, stones, clumps of dirt, or broken beans. Then they need to be rinsed to remove any remaining dirt or dust.

To sort the beans, I pour them onto one side of a rimmed baking sheet (a half-sheet pan) to keep them from spilling off. Then I slowly run my fingers through the pile of beans, pulling them towards me on the sheet. I watch the beans as they move, looking for anything that doesn't seem right. If I see something, I poke around in the beans until I find what caught my eye, and discard it. I repeat this a couple of times until I'm satisfied that everything is out of the beans.

Then I dump the beans into a fine-mesh strainer and rinse them under cold running water to wash off any dirt or dust still clinging to them.

Now the beans are sorted, rinsed, and ready for soaking or cooking.

Do You Need to Soak The Pinto Beans Before Pressure Cooking?

I get a lot of questions about soaking beans. Pinto beans don't need to be soaked before cooking; they pressure cook just fine from dry.

Now, if you want to, you can soak the beans. It won't hurt anything. Sort and rinse the beans, then soak them overnight in water. This reduces the cooking time to 22 minutes at high pressure. (The rest of the recipe is unchanged.)

Tips and Tricks

• Salt your bean water! "Salt toughens beans" is a myth. Salting before cooking helps season the beans all the way through as they cook.
• Still crunchy beans: If your beans are still tough when the cooking time is over, especially any "floaters" at the top of the pot, give the beans a stir, lock the lid, and pressure cook for another five minutes. Older beans take longer to cook, and if they've been sitting on the shelf for a while, they may need extra time. (The other way to deal with floaters is to scoop them from the top of the pot with a slotted spoon and discard them, but I don't like wasting the beans.)
• Too watery: Pressure cookers don't allow much evaporation. If your beans are too watery for your tastes, make sure to do the simmer the beans step.

Storage

Cowboy beans will last in the refrigerator for a few days and can be frozen for up to 6 months. Beans always freeze well, so I'm happy to have leftovers. I freeze them in 2-cup containers for lunch-sized portions.

Related Posts

Pressure Cooker Southwestern Pinto Bean Soup
Instant Pot Quick Chili (with Canned Beans)
Instant Pot Chorizo Chili (with Pinto Beans)
Instant Pot Turkey Chili with Small Red Beans
If you're looking for something else, here is my index of Instant Pot and Pressure Cooker Recipes.

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