This Instant Pot black bean soup with bacon, green chile, and spices cooks in about an hour – no need to soak or simmer the beans for hours! It’s so easy you can make it on a weeknight.

Instant Pot Black Bean Soup

When I got my Instant Pot earlier this year one of the must-tries I scribbled on my list was black bean soup. Although there’s already a black bean soup buried in this site’s archives it’s one made with canned beans – a fact that carries no shame because canned beans are economical and convenient and a go-to ingredient in my kitchen. Pre-Instant Pot days, I turned to canned beans because dried ones frustrated me with their long cook time and high-maintenance attitude. But back in the early days of this year’s summer when my electric pressure cooker arrived, I sensed a new dawn for my bean soup-making ways. With an Instant Pot, there’s no soaking and no long-term bean simmering session required on the stove.

But at the time I was scribbling my must-make list, I felt like I was living inside an Instant Pot given that the heat index was around 100 degrees for an ungodly amount of days in a row. To publish something as cozy and hearty as a bowl of black bean soup at the height of summer seemed silly. No one on this side of the globe is interested in coziness mid-July. And so it was just over a week ago, on a cool and breezy September day, that I locked the ingredients for a smoky black bean soup inside my electric pressure cooker and closed the steam vent. A soup of tender and creamy black beans swimming in a rich and hearty broth emerged about an hour later and now I may never go back to canned beans for soup-making again.

Some Ingredients You’ll Need

As it is for all Instant Pot recipes it’s important to note the model I use (Instant Pot Duo Mini 3 Qt) and that this is a small-batch recipe that makes enough smoky black bean for two people. I can’t say with any degree of confidence how this recipe might work in a different kind of pressure cooker or how it might turn out if you double or triple the recipe, so proceed with caution if you are planning to try either of those things.
Before the beans, we start with some bacon. The Instant Pot has a sautee feature which is mostly useless for browning things but does an excellent job cooking bacon. In this case, cooking the bacon just long enough to render its fat before sauteeing the chopped red onion and garlic in it.
To go with the smoky bacon I added chili powder, cumin, and dried oregano before adding a few tablespoons of canned diced green chile. Depending on your heat tolerance you can go with either mild or hot chiles. I like a warm chile flavor so I opted for mild.
Add some chicken stock and dried black beans and all that’s left to do is secure the lid, close the vent, and set the timer for one hour. It takes the pot a bit of time to get to pressure during which you can busy yourself with other tasks like bill-paying or vacuuming or Netflicking and before you know it the timer will ding, you’ll open the steam vent and marvel at how quickly those beans went from rock hard to tender and soft. Ladle the soup into bowls, garnish each with avocado, cilantro, and crumbled feta cheese and dig in.

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