Rather than a "sure-fire-technique", "secrets" maybe just be a one-by-one elimination of errors. Sorry if this is obvious, but "blown up beans" pretty much uni

Rather than a "sure-fire-technique", "secrets" maybe just be a one-by-one elimination of errors. Sorry if this is obvious, but "blown up beans" pretty much universally means "overcooked". They probably would have been good if you'd cooked them less. However, "hard" beans are trickier. It might just mean "undercooked", and you can give them another few mins in the pressure cooker, or it might mean that the beans are old/were not stored in a dry air-tight container. So how to pressure cook good beans: Start here for rough times: https://fastcooking.ca/pressure_cookers/cooking_times_pressure_cooker.php https://fastcooking.ca/pressure_cookers/cooking_times_pressu... Cover beans with about 2-3x water. The goal is that once the beans have expanded there is no excess water. The excess is just diluting your seasoning. prepare seasoning (in this example for something good in a burrito, w/ corn bread, or served with a braised pork shoulder): brown a lot of onions in a lot of oil. For 2 cups of dry black/pinto beans, something like 1 large onion and 1/4c of neutral oil. Add 1/2 head of chopped garlic to the mess after the onions are browned. Add another drizzle of oil and into it add ground chili (preferably a smoky one like morita), cumin, and black pepper just as you are turning off the heat. The effect of cooking spices a moment in oil is positive (see indian "tadka"). Add salt and seasoning* in with the uncooked beans. My rule of thumb is that the cooking water should taste decidedly salty - a bit saltier than you ultimately want the beans to taste, since the salt will disperse somewhat into the volume of the beans. *Some people say don't salt or season until the beans are cooked, else your beans will stay tough. This is definitively not true in the case of salt - in fact the opposite, salt is shown to help denature the protein in beans and decrease cooking time: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0,48&q=salt+cook+beans https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0,48&q=salt+... It seems to be somewhat true in the case of the calcium leached from seasoning like onions and garlic, but, IMO with the pressure cooker it's not an issue in practice. Also cooking in an alkaline solution can help denature tough, improperly stored, beans. So if you're having a rough go of it, you could try adding a tsp of baking soda to the pot. Happy beaning!