Conventional wisdom has long held that dried beans should be soaked before cooking. As the thinking went, soaking beans overnight in cold water helped them to cook faster, produced creamier interiors, and made them easier to digest. The problem: The time investment pretty much made a spontaneous pot of beans a nonstarter. If you found, say, a delicious-looking dried beans recipe that called for an overnight soak, well, you had to make it for dinner tomorrow night.

But in the past few years, chefs have rethought the soak, including Joe Yonan, author of Cool Beans: The Ultimate Guide to the World’s Most Versatile Plant-Based Protein.

“My basic feeling about soaking is it’s definitely not a requirement; you can just cook some beans,” says Yonan. “There are some reasons you may want to [soak], but what I didn’t realize until several years ago is there are good reasons not to.”