Beans: Buying, Storing, and Cooking Them Right

The pantry workhorses: black beans for Latin dishes, pinto for refried and chili, chickpeas for hummus and curries, kidney and cannellini for stews and salads, lentils, which split into fast red lentils that dissolve into dal and sturdy green ones that hold for salads. Dried beans cost about a third of canned per serving, canned beans cost 15 minutes.

One safety rule stands apart: raw or undercooked kidney beans, including in slow cookers on low, carry phytohaemagglutinin, a toxin that causes violent vomiting. A 10 minute hard boil destroys it, which is why kidney beans must reach a full boil before anything else happens to them.

Dried beans should look uniform, dry, and free of holes, weevils get in badly stored bags. Canned beans: check the can is not dented along the seams or bulging, and buy salted over unsalted if you like, the sodium rinses off, a 30 second rinse cuts it by roughly 40 percent.

Dried beans do not last forever in quality. Older beans take much longer to soften, and beans on a store shelf for three years may never go tender no matter how long they cook, which is the real reason behind many never-soften stories.

Dried beans keep 1 to 2 years in an airtight container in a dark pantry for best cooking, and indefinitely with longer soaking and cooking needed. Canned beans keep 2 to 5 years unopened in the pantry. Once opened, canned beans keep 3 to 4 days refrigerated in a container, not the open can.

Cooked beans keep 4 days refrigerated and freeze brilliantly for 6 months in their cooking liquid, which is why cooking a whole pot and freezing in portions beats opening cans forever.

For dried beans, sort for stones, rinse, then soak overnight in plenty of water, or do the quick soak, boil 2 minutes and rest 1 hour, which is equivalent. Skipping the soak entirely works, it just costs more cooking time. Always discard the soak water, that is where the indigestible sugars went.

Cook them in fresh water at a bare simmer with the lid ajar, 45 minutes to 2 hours depending on age, until tender, and salt the cooking water from the start, salt makes beans tender, not tough. Acid is what toughens: add tomatoes, vinegar, or citrus only after the beans are soft. For canned beans, rinse, then warm them in their dish, they only need heat, not cooking.

• Bean for bean: black, pinto, and kidney trade freely in chili and burritos, cannellini and chickpeas trade in soups and salads, the texture shifts a little and the seasoning carries the dish.
• Lentils for ground meat: brown lentils simmered soft stand in for ground beef in tacos and bolognese at a quarter of the cost, with walnuts or mushrooms added for chew.
• Tofu or edamame: for quick bowls where beans would simmer too long, cubed firm tofu or shelled edamame add the protein in minutes.