The Glycemic Index Diet for Dummies - Meri Raffetto [101]
The next sections show you the difference between canned beans and dried beans and provide cooking tips for both types. Get ready to be a bean novice no more!
Pointing out what you should know about canned beans versus dried
You have one major choice when it comes to beans: canned or dried. Canned beans are already cooked, so you can use them instantly on a salad or in soups and other hot meals. Dried beans, on the other hand, need a little preparation before you can enjoy them. Specifically, dried beans must be soaked before you can cook them. Not only is soaking dried beans the only way to get them clean before cooking but it also helps
Decrease their overall cooking time
Remove gas-producing compounds from the outer coating of the shell
Retain nutrients
Making small changes in the way you prepare foods can greatly impact the foods' glycemic content. Canned beans and dried beans often have different glycemic levels. Sometimes the canned is higher than the dried; other times the dried is higher than the canned. These differences are subtle and shouldn't make a large impact on your choices. Why? Because you're not getting too caught up in small number variances. The numbers still fall within a low or medium range, so you're in good shape regardless.
Preparing and cooking both kinds of beans
Similar to whole grains (covered in the earlier "Presenting your whole grain cooking guide" section), beans may seem intimidating, but they're not as bad to work with as you may think. Granted, dried beans require a bit more preparation, but cooking them is a fairly straightforward process. Of course, if you really don't want to tackle the soaking and cooking steps of dried beans, you can easily use canned ones. Regardless of which way you go, the following sections present some quick preparation and cooking tips.
Canned beans
Whether you want the convenience canned beans offer or you just prefer the taste of them, keep the following in mind:
If you're adding cold beans to a salad, rinse them in a colander. Doing so removes the saucy liquid and helps decrease some of the sodium used as a preservative.
When adding canned beans to a hot dish, make sure to add them toward the end of cooking. Otherwise they can become too soggy and fall apart.
Dried beans
Eating dried beans requires a little more upfront work, but it's certainly worth it. First things first: preparation. Preparing dried beans for cooking involves soaking them in one of two ways:
A leisurely soak is the most common method for preparing dried beans. Soak 'em in a large pot of water overnight. Afterward, simply discard the liquid and cook with fresh water.
You can also soak your dried beans the quick way. Bring water to a boil, remove it from the heat, and let the beans soak in the hot water for three to four hours. Discard the liquid and then cook the beans in fresh water.
To cook dried beans after soaking, cover about 1 pound of beans with 6 cups of fresh water (not the soaking water). Simmer the beans until they're cooked and soft. Table 15-3 shows you some great low-glycemic beans along with their cooking times (which depend on whether you're cooking in a saucepan or a pressure cooker).
A tale of old beans
Have you ever bitten into cooked beans and gotten one that was hard as a rock? No, you're not a horrible cook who didn't soak her beans long enough or cook them long enough. The real problem is that the bean was an HTC, or "hard to cook" bean (quite the technical term, I know). HTC refers to beans that are old or have been stored improperly. Telling one of these beans from a good bean when dried is absolutely impossible, but you can take a few steps to avoid getting these little HTC rocks, I mean beans, in your bunch:
Check the package dating