Cool BEANS
Canned beans star in soup, snacks and more
As the world faces a pandemic, eating well at home takes on a high priority. Many home pantries showcase canned goods, including a lineup of canned beans, the cornerstones of spur-of-the-moment meals that are high in protein and fiber. The whush-whirl sound of lid parting can announces that dinner is just minutes away. It’s a welcome tune to a frazzled cook’s ears. Purists might argue that cooked-from-scratch beans are better, insisting that canned beans are saltier and more expensive. True, but dried can take an hour or two to cook, eliminating them as a candidate for quick-to-prepare meals. Folks with concerns about salt can plop the beans from the can into a colander. Once rinsed with cold water, they shimmer like tiny pebbles in a shallow stream. As a general rule, don’t add much salt to the dish until it is completed; add salt to taste to the finished dish.
To substitute canned beans in a recipe that calls for fromscratch cooking, remember that in the cooking process, dried beans expand to almost three times their size; 1/2 cup of dried beans becomes about 1 1/3 cups of cooked beans. A 15-ounce can contains about 1 1/4 to 1 1/2 cups of beans, but measurements can vary from one producer to the next. Fortunately, recipes that call for beans generally don’t require exact measurements.
For an easy bean soup, cook 1 small onion (chopped) and 2 peeled carrots (diced) in 2 tablespoons olive oil in a large saucepan or Dutch oven until onion softens, about 5 minutes. Open two 15-ounce cans of navy beans, great northern white beans or cannellini beans (rinse in colander if concerned about salt); add to onion mixture. Add 2 1/4 cups low-sodium chicken broth, vegetable broth or water. (If desired, add a 1/2 cup diced ham.) Bring to boil on high heat; reduce heat and simmer for 10 minutes. Remove about 1 1/2 cups of soup and puree (in blender or food processor — or if you have an immersion blender, place wand in soup and whirl long enough to puree about 1/3 of the mixture). Return pureed mixture to soup. Season to taste with salt and pepper, or some seasoned salt such as Spike or Lawry’s. I usually add a little hot sauce to jazz it up; Frank’s Redhot is a favorite because it adds both “heat” and a welcome acidity.