The Food Lab: Better Home Cooking Through Science

taking at best several hours, and at worst, a full day
of soaking, followed by simmering. So I did what any
sensible, sober man would do: I bought them canned.
There are a couple of distinct advantages that
canned beans have over dried. For one, their texture
is pretty much always spot on. Bean canners have
got the process down to an art, and you’d now be
hard-pressed to open a can and find beans that were
broken, chalky, hard, or anything short of perfectly
creamy and intact—not always an easy thing to
accomplish at home. For another thing, canned
beans come with some nice, full-bodied liquid. Many
recipes tell you to rinse the stuff off. That makes
sense if you’re making, say, a bean salad, but the
liquid is awesome in soups, adding flavor and body
to an otherwise thin broth.
There’s only one real problem with canned beans:
flavor.
With dried beans, you have the option of cooking
your beans in any number of media—water, chicken
stock, pork broth, dashi, a sweet molassesy tomato
sauce—and adding whatever aromatics you like—
onions, carrots, celery, bay leaves, thyme, pork fat
—in order to get flavor built right into them. Canned
beans, on the other hand, are designed to have a
neutral flavor that will work moderately well in any
dish but shine in none.
Luckily for us, there are means to getting a bit of
flavor back into those guys.
Most simple canned bean soup recipes call for