This is part of a series I’ve been creating for Azumio. Azumio is an app company dedicated to improve health and wellness by tracking sleep and steps, monitoring your glucose levels and heart rate, and providing exercise libraries and routines.
“Can of beans.” It’s on a lot of people’s shopping lists week in, week out. A can of beans is pretty fast and convenient, but you’ve only got what you need for one dish. With a small amount of prep and planning, you can grab a bag of dried beans and get so much more than one meal out of it.
Why Dried Beans?
Dried beans take a little more work upfront, but the payoffs of cooking with them far outweigh that work.
It Saves You Money: The biggest benefit of using dried beans is getting more bean for your buck. A pound of dried beans, depending on the variety, can cost on average $3-6. Most 15 oz cans of beans cost anywhere from $1-3. Once cooked, a pound of dried beans makes about 6 cups of beans while a 15 oz can is just shy of 2 cups. Buying a bag of dried beans and cooking them at home is about half the cost of buying one can and you’ll have at least 3 times the amount of beans.
It Saves you Time: Cook the whole pound of dried beans and portion them out into 15-16 ounce freezer-safe containers. This way, you’ve already got beans ready for future meals for a few weeks or months, depending on how often you use beans.
You can leave the beans out on the counter for a few hours or leave in the fridge before heading to work and your beans will be ready to cook when you get home.