The Timing Rule You Need For The Best Soup From Canned Beans

If you're preparing a comforting soup recipe that calls for beans, using the canned variety is a great shortcut that lets you include all your favorite legumes without waiting through a long soak and simmer process. But whether you're cooking Tuscan white bean soup or the bean dish that is the signature soup of the U.S. Senate, there's a timing rule you should follow for optimum flavor. To enhance their taste, you should simmer your canned beans with the rest of the soup's contents for a half-hour.

This ensures that the beans have adequate time to absorb your soup's seasonings and the flavors from the other ingredients. When fresh or dried beans are slow-cooked from scratch, they have plenty of time to soak in the seasonings and aromatics they're being cooked with, lending the legumes a depth of flavor. You don't get the same advantage with pre-cooked beans from a can, but letting them stew in the cooking liquid for those 30 minutes will help greatly.

A half hour is also a fairly short time, so this trick shouldn't run the risk of making the beans too mushy — though you might want to sample one or two throughout the cooking process. A canned substitute from your pantry can work very well in almost any soup if you follow this rule, along with a few other tips.

Before mixing canned beans into a dish, it's important to drain and rinse them thoroughly. Not only could the canning liquid add a too-thick, slimy texture and distracting flavor into your soup, but a great deal of excess salt, too — both affecting the flavor and sodium content of the dish.

That being said, beans can also be useful to thicken your soup and add texture in an intentional way. If you'd like your soup to be less brothy and have a richer consistency, simply remove a portion of the legumes after they've completed their 30-minute simmer. Purée them using a food processor, countertop blender, or immersion blender, and then return the resulting paste to the pan. Your soup will be easily and quickly thickened without affecting the flavor profile.

Another method for adding flavor to your beans (with or without the half-hour simmer) is sofrito, which is an ingredient commonly used in Latin American cooking. Simply finely chop or purée onions, garlic, peppers, and cilantro and sauté in olive oil until fragrant. Add your drained and rinsed beans, along with a bit of the broth for your soup, and simmer for at least 5 minutes. If you're using more than one can of beans, increase the amount of aromatics and olive oil proportionately. You can then incorporate the mixture into your pot for a big flavor boost.