Beans, beans the musical…nevermind! I love this awesome comparison from our friends at Smallish Blog. Check it out!
So, canned or dry? While the convenience of canned beans is near indisputable, I’d like to suggest that cooking your own dry beans is just as easy, more nutritious and waaay cheaper.
Canned beans have become the norm in America. They’re such a “no-brainer”-easy to store, long shelf life, simple to open. But maybe “no-brainer” options aren’t the best ones; after all, God gave us brains for a reason. I”m willing to bet most of our grandparents know the value of dry beans. I’m gonna join the bandwagon to help bring ‘em back. Let’s look quickly at cost, convenience, nutrition and taste.
- Cost. To make sure we’re comparing apples to apples, we’ll just look at pinto beans for this post because that’s what Caveman bought last week. In our grocery store, a normal 15 oz can of beans costs .80 on average. (They’ll be as low as .69 for the store brand and just over a dollar for organic.) A 2 lb (32 oz) bag of dry pinto beans costs $1.99 regularly (but my handsome hunter-gatherer caught them on sale for $1.79). My batch of cooked beans from that 2 lb bag made the equivalent of 8 cans. (I actually measured the beans out into 16 oz sets, so the real yield is slightly more than 8 cups.) Eight cans of beans at .80 equals $6.40. By buying a bag of dry beans on sale to get 8 cans-worth, I saved $4.61. That’s a bargain!
- Convenience. People buy canned because all they have to do is pull the can out of the pantry and, with a few flicks of the wrist (if you’re like me and are terrified of electric can openers), they’ve got beans. Freezing your own cooked beans is just as easy (1. Open fridge, 2. Pull out beans). The third step is the one that is different; instead of using a can opener to access the legumes, you must thaw them. If you have a microwave in your kitchen though, this step takes just a couple minutes. The ease is the same; using your own cooked beans might just take a little thinking ahead. And that, my friend, is why you use a to-do list. If you’re unsure about the actual process of cooking the beans, don’t fret. We’ll cover that next week.
- Nutrition. Cooking your own beans (as with cooking your own anything) allows you to control the amount of sodium, sugar, spices and extra ingredients added to your food. You know how fresh the beans are, and you can rest assured that they contain no preservatives to give them an unnaturally long life. If you freeze your own beans, they never see the inside of a BPA-lined aluminum can. The controversial chemical has had possible links to hormonal abnormalities, cancer risk and birth defects. Lastly, I can tell from the way my body reacts to cooked dry beans that they are more nutritious than the canned variety. They certainly live up to their reputation! Enough said.
- Taste. The beauty of cooking your own is the endless possibilities of taste. The beans can be seasoned however you choose-spicy, sweet, savory, splendidly. I find that they taste much better overall than canned. Dry beans also tend to hold their natural texture and don’t get as mushy as the ones you drop out of a tin.
Click here to go through the actual process of soaking and simmering your own batch of dry beans.
Have you ever tried to cook your own beans? Do you already? Will you consider trying after reading this?
