but as for soaking beans overnight or not, it all depends. Since you're doing them up in the crockpot, you can leave them cooking all night. If you were going to cook them in the pressure cooker then they usually work better presoaked. We never presoak our beans when doing them in the crockpot. Just make sure there is plenty of liquid. As for cooking the bacon first or not, either will work. I look forward to hearing how Charles does it. Me? I'd just toss it in raw. Beans need some oil in them for best flavor. You can get by with some kind of vegetable oil, but there's no substitute for pork fat for best flavor. I like to do something similar to his recipe, only I use a piece of smoked pork rib or some longaniza chopped up and tossed in raw - or fried first. I've done it both ways. When frying first I'll toss the grease into the beans along with the longaniza. We use black beans since they don't have pintos down here.

Rinse the beans with water, put them in the crockpot and that is that. Bacon is put in raw. The beans will swell up as they cook for the first few hours, so keep a watch on the water level and make certain the beans are covered. I put the beans on noon or miday on high and about sundown turn them to low for overnight cooking. I also add a fine choped small jalpeno, but that is not necessary. It it is a big pepper just use half or 1/3.