Do Dried Beans Go Bad?

I have a philosophy: "Given that there is an easy way and a hard way to do something, if the easy way was better there wouldn't be a hard way." That's why people who know me know that I never do anything the easy way. And so it is with dried beans. Why open a can when you can soak them overnight and cook them for two hours?

A few months ago I made my famous Bean and Pasta Italian soup. The Italian name is "pasta fagioli" but the American pronunciation is so stupid (pasta fazool, I've even heard say, "fazoo") that I refuse to play that game.

Anyway, this has been a can't-miss recipe for me. But a few months ago it disappointed me when some of the beans were crunchy. Not tooth-breaking crunchy, but they definitely had bite. WTF?

Quick background: What are the best beans? The healthiest? The most fiber? The tastiest? The answer is that I have no idea. Online information has often differed from the package info. So for the past several years - whatever it is I'm making - I mix five types of beans in a container and those are my beans. Doesn't matter what I'm making, if it's beans (lentils are different) that's what I use.

My translucent container doesn't photograph well but this is my 5-bean collection - kidney, great northern, black, pinto and navy.

Back to my fazoo. So I played with my soup and identified the smaller beans as the ones that tasted under-cooked. Those would be the navy beans. I searched online to see if navy beans had a reputation for being hard. Not really. Most cooks had no problem with navy beans but in one case I saw that someone suggested that their beans might be old.

Old? Really? These are dried beans. They could be used as gravel. They're hard when they're new. But I needed to get to the bottom of this. A test was needed.

With a 2014 expiration date the beans on the left were probably bought in 2013. The beans on the right were bought on Tuesday. That's about a 5 year difference.

The plan was quite simple. Take new beans, take old beans. Soak them overnight. Cook them. See if they're different. Don't worry, I'll find some way to complicate this.

I put the beans in cups to prepare for overnight soaking. Whoa - the 2014 beans on the left look darker and old. Maybe age does make a difference.

One if the issues I struggled with was how to cook them identically? Cooked on the stove I would need two identical pans on two identical burners adjusted to exactly the same temperature to get the exact same slow boil. No, I wasn't willing to baby sits beans for two hours.

Then I thought about ways to cook the beans in the same pot, but being able to keep them separate. To do this I would make a cheesecloth "sack" for old and new beans and throw the sacks in the same pot. So I tried making one and decided against it. The beans in the center of the sack were surrounded by other beans instead of freely-moving water.

Finally I looked in the pantry and noticed that I had two nearly identical loaf pans, the only difference being a strip of high-temp automotive gasket sealer on one of the pans.

After soaking, the suggested cook time varies by source from 30 minutes to two hours. I went for two hours to give them every chance to cook through. The gasket sealer is from a bread-baking experiment that I'm not sure I want to share.

The cooking went off without a hitch. Once the beans had cooled a bit I tasted them. I went back and forth to make sure that I wasn't chewing on an "outlier bean" that was especially hard or soft. No doubt about it. The 2014 beans were harder. The 2019 beans were very soft, arguably overcooked. But no complaints from me. When cooking beans I will always err on the side of overcooking. There is nothing desirable about beans al dente.

The 2014 beans (left) and 2019 beans after cooking. The beans on the right look more tender, don't they? Not sure? More to come.

So I could end it there. Beans do get old, expiration date does matter, we can all go home now. But I wanted to create a visual. So I gathered up the apparatus shown below: A yardstick, a can of tuna, a heavy 28-ounce meat pounder, a cutting board and our beans.

To demonstrate the difference between the old beans and the new I dropped a meat pounder from a height of 1 3/8" on a cluster of the 2014 navy beans and the 2019 beans See below. The tuna can, standing 1 3/8" tall, was my height gauge.

When the meat pounder was dropped on the 2014 beans it nearly bounced off. But when dropped onto the fresh dried beans it mashed most of them.

So now I am a believer. This weekend I will toss any beans more than one-year old and will replace them. Then I will make sure that I rotate my stock. Nothing lasts forever, not even rock-hard navy beans.