The more cookbooks and food blogs I read, the more I find a widespread derision for canned beans. Canned beans, the discussion goes, are so far inferior to freshly-cooked dried beans that no self-respecting foodie would ever use them.
I’m perplexed by the apparent strength of feeling many cooks have for the subject. Sure, dried beans come out better than canned ones – but are they so much better that it’s worth the extra effort? In general, I say no. (Garbanzos may be an exception in my book – I find that canned garbanzos sometimes have an off taste.
Cooking dried beans isn’t hard, but it does require you to plan ahead by almost a full day. First, you soak the beans for at least 8 hours. Then you simmer them for several hours (depending on the variety) or cook them all day in a slow cooker. You can pressure cook them, but that still takes almost an hour. If you’re me, you still risk turning them to mush, regardless of your chosen cooking method. For that reason, I’ve always felt that dried beans are nice, but canned beans are a perfectly acceptable substitute for the average meal.
I’m gratified to see that Mark Bittman agrees that maybe canned beans aren’t so bad after all. I’d think that dried beans run somewhat counter to the idea of being a Minimalist – wouldn’t you?
2 Comments
I completely agree that canned beans are a perfectly acceptable ingredient in a regular everyday meal. I get home from work at 7 pm, do you really think that I want to start boiling beans for hours after soaking them all night. I’m sure I’m not atypical in that respect. And cooking them in the pressure cooker can be dangerous right? Because they make a foam?
But if you’re making something specific and you want to control the texture you would have to go with dried. On the topic of garbanzo beans…and fresh ones like in the M. Bittman article you linked to, the fresh ones are the best. I found them once in a middle eastern market and although they take forever to shell, cooked up like fava beans in a pasta with ricotta. MM MMM!
Thanks for the great blog
we have this debate in our house all the time– because despite being a generally capable cook, max can’t cook beans. at all.
for me it’s a texture thing– you can’t get canned beans to have the right texture, no matter what. i don’t like beans to be too mushy, and somehow out of a can, they always are. of course, i don’t always have a full day’s advanced planning and a few hours of a vaguely watchful eye, but . . . if i did? dried, every time.