Canned beans are for suckers

It may be a testament to my previous years spent as a vegan or the limited number of figures in the checking account but I have found beans to be a very versatile food. Google can tell you about nutritional content, health benefits & recipes; I will instead focus on why you should be cooking your own beans rather than buying them in a can like a sucker.

Let’s take a trip to a store that offers dried goods in bulk and their canned counterparts. Let’s compare dried and canned beans through volume acquired by the amount of money spent. Specifically let’s look at black beans.

Let’s make the following assumptions:

A 15 ounce can of black beans costs around a buck.

16 ounces of dried black beans costs around 2 bucks.

Let’s consider the following:

The 15 ounce can of beans includes water weight.

The dried beans will expand in volume and weight after the soaking/simmering process.

Let’s do the math:

A 15 ounce can of black beans, once drained and rinsed, turns into 8.8 ounces of beans filling a volume of about 1.5 cups. I tried this with two brands of canned beans and reached similar conclusions within 5% (oddly enough the generic brand had less water weight than the name brand).

Six ounces of dried beans, after 2.5 hours of simmering to a good texture, turns into 14.2 ounces of beans, filling 2.5 cups of volume.

So 1 cup of cooked beans from the can cost $0.66 and from the dried bulk source cost $0.30. While halving the cost of your beans may seem impressive the annual difference, even if you eat a cup of beans a week, is about twenty bucks. There are, however, more subtle benefits:

1 – You cut out a middle-man: the canner. You removed the energy required by canning from the process of food to table.

2 – You saved a can from the recycling bin. From an energy standpoint recycling is generally preferred to production but by avoiding the can all together you also avoid the energy spent to recycle it.

3 – You are now planning your meals rather than just reacting to hunger and making them. After all, what the hell are you going to do with a cup of beans a week? You’ll figure it out but the clock is ticking: I have kept them in the fridge, sealed of course, for at least 10 days and didn’t notice a degradation in flavor.

4 – The cooking process generates a lot of latent heat to the kitchen. This is a good opportunity to raise some bread, drop a tea kettle on top of the simmering pot or even turn off the heating element to your house.

This is admittedly a small step to reducing the money you spend, your reliance on others, and the energy you spend. However, that is the point. Start with yourself and start small.