my daughter cuts up onion in her beans too and adds a can of cream of chicken soup to make the juice thick. i have on occasion added cream of mushroom soup for thicker soup.

Take your potato masher and mash some beans in the pot after cooking then boil, thickens nicely, no add salt.

If you put the other recipe ingredients into the beans before you cooked them, that may be why they didn't soften up.

First you soak the beans. Overnight is good, but the beans have absorbed about all they can in about 8 hours.
Second you cook the beans in just water until they are almost soft but not mush.
Now you add the other ingredients and bake them for hours on very low heat. Over night is great if you can sleep with that wonderful aroma in the house.

I ALWAYS soak my beans overnight & then I change the water in the morning & simmer them for at least an hour to an hour and a half BEFORE baking them. Works for me.

I cooked a batch of beans in 24 minutes last night in the pressure cooker. 20 might have been enough. A bit of an experiment. Next time I will wait until after cooking to add the spices - the PC intensified the flavors and pulled more of the salt out of the ham so I shouldn't have added any salt. But, all in all, a success. Previously, I preferred the stovetop to the crockpot.

There's nothing to it in a pressure cooker. Wouldn't be without mine!

When I make beans in the crockpot I soak them overnight, drain that water and use new water or liquid and let them cook at least 12 hours.

Just got an Instant Pot and made delicious black eyed peas (not exactly the same I think?) in 25 minutes of pressured cooking. It has to come up to pressure and then cook for 25 minutes, then let it release naturally. I'm guessing I won't go back to the crockpot for them.

This is exactly how I feel. My daughter's crock pot died and I just might give her mine. Love my Instant Pot (not the smoking kind. lol)

My favorite way to make pinto beans is the same way grandma did them. She was raised during the depression and was what you would call a simple cook. She pre-soaked the bag of beans overnight, drained the beans, then cooked all day. When the beans were soft, she would get out another kettle, chop up some bacon, and fry it until one uniform light brown color, drain about half the grease, then transfer the beans to the bacon pot so you don't loose the "fond" from the bacon cooking. Simmer with onion, garlic, salt and pepper, another hour. Serve either with fresh or frozen (cools the beans off)cornbread under the beans in the bowl. Nirvana on a cold winter day. My brothers and uncles used to put ketchup in theirs instead of the cornbread, and ate the cornbread on the side.

(If you have a large recipe for cornbread, make it, cut it, and put squares in zipper bags and freeze. When you take a square out, microwave for 20 seconds and add butter. Cornbread freezes better than regular bread and still tastes just made after weeks in the freezer.)

Today we are making black eyed peas cooked the same way as grandma did pintos, to celebrate the new year. Yes, with cornbread. We always have either cornbread or brown rice with beans.