Why Canned Chickpeas Stay Hard and the Simple Solution That Softens Them Quickly

Canned beans are high on my list of useful food innovations. You don’t need to remember to soak dried beans overnight or spend a lot of time cooking them on a busy weekday: just open the top and they’re ready to go. Regardless of the type, whether soft like northern white beans or firm like kidney beans, canned beans are almost always cooked perfectly and work well in many recipes. For example, you can drain them then dry them in the oven for black bean burger patties. You can marinate them in salad dressings and flavorings to quickly create bean salads. And you can turn them into dips and spreads.

However, some recipes call for very soft beans, softer than what comes out of the can. Try making hummus from canned chickpeas and you’ll likely get something flavorful but slightly grainy, not with the silky smoothness of the best hummus. Likewise, mashing canned pinto beans won’t give you the velvety, creamy texture of excellent frijoles refritos.

Many chickpea braises and stews are also only best when the chickpeas are so tender that they fall apart with the slightest pressure. For a good chana masala, for example, the chickpeas should be soft enough that they can squish easily between the folds of the hot, spongy naan.

When preparing chickpeas from scratch, Indians often use pressure cookers to achieve the desired softness in a reasonable amount of time. But what if you want to enjoy the convenience of canned chickpeas? They’re cooked, but resist crushing when squeezed, which means you have to do something to them. Fortunately, the solution—briefly simmering canned chickpeas or other beans with baking soda—is quick enough to still provide the convenience of canning, while still yielding properly softened legumes.

Canned chickpeas and the effect of calcium chloride

Almost all canned chickpeas would benefit from additional softening when intended for recipes like purees and braises where an extra-soft texture is desired, but some require intervention more than others. This is because not all canned beans are prepared the same way and some are processed to maintain their shape. Also GOOD.

Canned bean manufacturers aim to sell beans with minimal splits and blowouts, because splits in beans look unattractive and cause starch leakage. To ensure sufficient firmness, they often add calcium chloride during processing. You can check the can’s ingredient list to see whether or not it was used in your can of beans.

I checked five brands of canned beans and found that those with calcium chloride had beans that were much firmer and more chew-resistant. Although the texture of each brand varied slightly, the hardness increased noticeably when calcium chloride was used.

Calcium chloride prevents beans from becoming mushy by reacting with the pectin in the beans. When heated, the pectin in the cell walls of the chickpea absorbs water and expands, forming cross-links with dissolved calcium ions. This creates a stable, heat-resistant network, making the integuments firmer, preventing them from opening.

There are several ways to deal with the extra firmness caused by calcium chloride, but first, let’s talk about the canning liquid.

How to Soften Chickpeas and Other Firm Canned Beans

As mentioned above, any canned bean can benefit from a softening step if used in a dish where the goal is extremely silky purees or tender braises, but this is especially important when using canned beans treated with calcium chloride.

Baking soda

One of the best ways to quickly soften canned beans is the properties of baking soda. Baking soda replaces the beans’ rigid calcium ions with more flexible sodium ions and creates an alkaline environment that breaks down the glycosidic bonds holding the beans’ pectin molecules together, resulting in the desired softness.

You don’t need much, just half a teaspoon of baking soda per 1 1/2 cups of beans (that’s the typical yield from a 15-ounce can). The longer you boil the beans with baking soda, the more it breaks them down. After five minutes, the beans began to absorb the baking soda. About seven minutes, you get a soft, puffy grain, with wonderfully softened skins, providing an even texture when you bite into them.

After seven or eight minutes, the skins begin to separate while the insides begin to soften and then collapse. After 20 minutes, the baking soda begins to disintegrate the structure of the bean, with many pieces sticking to the surface of the pan.

The downside to this baking soda technique is that the boiling liquid tastes a bit soapy and bitter, and this taste can carry over to any dish in which the cooking liquid is used. So I recommend draining the canned beans first, saving the canning liquid, and simmering the beans with baking soda and plain water. You can then drain and discard the baking soda liquid and return the beans to their canning liquid with any additional liquid needed for your recipe.

In practice, the best way to proceed is to:

• Combine drained canned beans with enough liquid to cover in a small saucepan (reserve liquids from can if they are needed in your recipe).
• Add 1/2 teaspoon of baking soda for each 15-ounce can of drained beans (1 1/2 cups).
• Bring to a boil, then check every two minutes by removing a bean from the pot with a slotted spoon and (when cool enough to handle) pressing it between your fingers to determine if it is tender enough.
• Remove from heat, drain, and discard baking soda-tinged cooking liquid (recombine chickpeas with reserved canned bean liquid, if desired).

One final note: Baking soda can change the color of the bean, making it darker due to its effect on the anthocyanins in colored beans like pinto beans and kidney beans.

Pressure cooker

An alternative to baking soda is to use a pressure cooker to further soften canned beans. Simply empty the can into the cooker and set it, no stirring or babysitting. It’s important to note, however, that there’s not the same time savings here: the pressure cooker takes about ten minutes to build pressure, five minutes to soften the beans, and ten minutes beyond that for the pressure to drop. That’s almost half an hour of cooking time added to your recipe, and not much shorter than cooking dried beans from scratch in a pressure cooker.

That said, you can take advantage of the pressure cooker by adding aromatics to the liquid from the beans, enhancing their flavor. Even with just five minutes of pressure cooking and a few spices like a bay leaf, cinnamon stick, cloves, and cardamom, the canned bean liquid and beans become wonderfully aromatic.

Pressure cooker + baking soda?

You may be wondering if there’s an argument for combining the powers of baking soda and a pressure cooker to soften canned beans. I tested it and concluded that it was generally not a good idea. The results were very squishy beans that quickly disintegrated into a sludge. There may be some cases, like bean purees, where this extreme sweetness wouldn’t be a big problem, but mostly I think it’s better to choose one method or the other, not both.

June 2024