How To Substitute Canned Green Beans For Frozen

Canned green beans are a modern convenience, perfect in a pinch when you need a vegetable to go with dinner; all you have to do is pop the can open and voilà — you've got a green vegetable with nearly the same nutritional value as fresh, ready to heat up. To imbue canned green beans with loads of flavor you can add bacon, or dress them up with two easy additions (fancy enough for a dinner party side), but if you want to substitute them in place of frozen green beans, you'll have to make a few adjustments.

First, most canned green beans, unless you can find a no-salt version at your grocery store, tend to be higher in sodium than is good for our hearts, and certainly much higher than the frozen variety (even the "low sodium" canned beans can still have more of the mineral than they should). So if you want to use them in place of frozen, it's a good idea to not only drain them, but also give them a rinse in a colander to help remove sodium, or risk the dish you're using them in being quite salty tasting.

There is also cooking time to consider. Canned green beans already have a much softer texture than even thawed-from-frozen green beans. Make sure you don't overcook your beans-from-a-can, as they can turn into a pile of mush.

Most kitchen doyens would agree that substituting frozen green beans for canned is the swap they'd prefer, since there is no chance of additional salt or preservatives — just natural beans, flash-frozen at their peak ripeness, with as much nutritional value as fresh. But they still come with their own set of challenges that you must overcome to reach your green bean goals.

Again, texture comes into play, because frozen beans, like fresh ones, are much firmer from the start. So if you're using them in place of canned beans in, say, a green bean casserole, you'll want to partly-cook or even cook them all the way through to get a similar mouthfeel to the much softer canned beans. Frozen green beans, when cooked from frozen, can also put off a lot more water than canned as they cook down, so you might want to make adjustments to the other liquids in your recipe, too.