Substituting Dry Beans

Most recipes that use beans, call for the canned beans. Canned beans are convenient, as they’re ready to use immediately in a recipe.

I prefer to buy dry beans as they’re more compact and environmentally friendly. I use a pressure cooker to conveniently cook beans so it’s never been a hassle for me.

But this means I’m always doing conversions from dry beans (by weight) to canned beans (by volume). Which is non-trivial and a giant hassle.

I keep referring back to this SeriousEats article as a reference. Here’s hoping that tldr-ing it will act as a memory mnemonic.

Converting Canned Beans to Weight

The typical canned bean size is 15 oz or 425 g. Drained and rinsed (as recipes often call for), this is 9 oz or 255 g. In terms of volume, this is equivalent to 1.5 cups or 360 ml.

Alright, now we can mentally map all these recipes to meaningful sizes, instead of having to deal with can to cup conversion + can to drained. I can handle one-dimensional conversion between imperial and metric systems. But I don’t have the patience to include density calculations in order to convert from volume to mass.

Converting Dry to Cooked Beans

1 cup of dry beans will expand to 2-2.3 cups. The expansion is dependent on type of bean but this will serve as a good rule of thumb.

Weight change is a bit trickier. Many beans tend to increase in weight similar to the increase in volume. 100 g of dry beans will become 200-230 when cooked.

However, some beans absorb a lot more water when cooking. Chickpeas and black-eyed peas increase in weight by 3 times, even though the volume change was the same as other beans.

The freshness and bean variety is going to affect how much water is absorbed. It’s best to treat the measurements as estimates and adjust accordingly.

Putting This Altogether

A rough guideline for most beans is to use 4.5 oz or 130 g dry beans to substitute for 15 oz of canned beans.

Amount of cooked beans in Recipe	Amount of Dry beans to Cook
1 cup	40 g
1 can	130 g
100 g	45 g

Water Ratio

To cook this in pressure cooker, we want to minimize the water so that the flavours are not diluted. Dry beans need about 1:1.5 the water.

Use discretion because some beans will absorb more water and expand more. If this is the case, use 1:2.

Lentils need about 1:1.