Long cooking time continues to be a major hindrance to the widespread consumption of beans. It is an important trait with implications for gender equity, energy utilization, and nutritional value of diets. In order to develop Phaseolus vulgaris genotype with faster cooking time, an experiment was conducted at Dang University of Ngaoundéré campus on five common bean cultivars and ten F1 hybrids synthesized from 5 x 5 half diallel mating. Cooking time test was carried out on freshly harvested dry seeds (T=0) and 10 days stored seeds (T=10) using the standardized Mattson cooker method. Analysis of variance showed that, the differences among the five cultivars for cooking time were highly significant (p< 0.001) for fresh and stored seeds indicating the presence of wide genetic variability. Freshly harvested beans cook 3-4 times faster than beans stored for 10 days. High broad sense heritability and high narrow sense heritability values showed the preponderance of genetic variance and the additive gene action in the governing of cooking time. The ratio GCA/SCA was greater than unity, confirming the importance of additive genetic variance for this character. The fastest cooking lines PR and PB appeared also as the best general combiners. Among the crosses, F1 hybrids PB x BI, PB x CT, PB x PR, PN x PR and BI x PR had positive and significant specific combining ability. Recessive alleles had positive effect for reducing cooking time and genotype PR had the maximum number of recessive genes. These results would help breeders to improve this trait in terms of initial parent selection and subsequent crossbred selection and breeding procedures.