Dry Pinto Beans

Well, you cook them in water. How much does water add?

http://nutritiondata.self.com/facts/legumes-and-legume-products/4430/2

Pasta, beans, rice all say dry on the NI on packaging...as long as you cook in water the NI will not change. When food like this cooks and absorbs water it gets bigger but nothing actually changes with the food...you understand this right?

I typically measure out the dry beans in 1/4 cup increments when i make something...say 1 cup in a recipe: then I just make sure the recipe makes four servings.... no worries there, I used a single serving of beans, etc. I agree with "Smarty pants", water doesn't add anything, so where's the dilemma? Just make sure you've properly measured out the dried beans before cooking.

Allow me a crack at explaining this. And this works for all "Dry foods" that expand after cooking (Beans, rice, lentils etc)

Calories in dry beans: 60
Calories in water: 0
Calories in total: 60

Just because a food expanded after cooking didn't added any calories the 1/4th of a cup dry give the same amount of calories if that cup expanded to 1 cup. As long as you didn't added anymore beans, no new source of calories were added were there? Now if you added other ingredients, then simply add those ingredients calories to the mix

Hopefully this helped

Tonya- It's not a blond moment or a dumb question. If you don't divide out and count up the number of servings in the cooked pot of beans or pasta, you have no idea if you're eating '.5c dry' or what.

The only problem I have with measuring cooked beans is after said beans are cooked, the water you added isnt water anymore, it's bean juice (water with disolved bean solids from the cooking process). You could assume that beans have the same caloric value as bean juice, but I think it likely that that assumption is false.

Notice: Below is how I do it and I am not to saying anyone not doing it this way is "wrong". This is just the most accurate way I've found to measure cooked beans per serving. I tend to measure everything I eat in a similar manner.

First off.. if at all possible, I measure everything with a caloric value by weight, especially solids. For instance, I never use "1 cup" of beans.. I always use "5.08oz/0.317lb of beans" or whatever. Liquids tend to be measured fairly accurately in cups, if what you are measuring is not a combination of 2 or more liquids or a liquid with disolved solids.

I weight a quantity of beans, say, 1lb of beans, then add however many cups of water, according to the recipe I'm using. I rarely weigh the water as a percentage is going to evaporate during cooking. While "Smarty pants" is right that water is water is water and it doesn't have a caloric value, after cooking is complete, bean juice is not water anymore. I determine how many servings my quanity of beans supply and that determines what percentage, by weight, I eat per serving, after the beans are cooked.

To do this, I need the weight of the cooked beans, strained and weigh the bean juice separately. For this example, let's say my 1lb of beans and quanity of water resulted in 2lbs of beans (strained) and 2 lbs of bean juice (rarely will it be a whole number, but the process is the same, either way) and the label on my beans says my 1lb of beans is 12.5 servings. Since I like to eat an equal amount of beans and juice and I want 1 total serving, I'd divde 12.5 servings by the total weight , which comes to 5.12oz/145g of bean and juice, for this example, and then measure half of each or 2.56oz of each. You could divide 12.5 servings by the total 4lbs and try to get 5.12oz with an equal amount of each, but I would likely get more of one than the other. As I got to the bottom of the pot, I would likely do it this way (combined weight) but while there is lots of each, I'd measure them separately.

Notice: This is just an arbitrary example. I'm not saying eating 5.12oz is 1 serving. It will always vary based on how much water you added, on how much water evaporates during cooking and how much water is absorbed by the beans and the kind of beans to determine how much both beans and juice will weigh.

I understand not everyone will take it to such an extreme, but I figure if I'm going to measure it at all, I might as well measure it as accurately as I possibly can or not do it at all.

I guess you could make less math for yourself and weigh and cook the amount you intend to eat, but I imagine cooking dry beans a serving at a time to be much more tedious then doing the math to figure 1 serving, after cooking a known quanity of beans. But... cooking 1 or two servings of dry beans by weight and eating all the beans and juice would be as accurate.

If anyone has a better way to do the above, please say so, but this is how I have been measuring servings for cooked dry beans, to date.

Wow. What great discussion. Don't mean to shoot a dead horse... or bring it back alive but doesn't the last responder mean to say that usually 1 cup of dry beans makes 2 cups of cooked beans? The other point I'd like to make is, nobody in their right mind is going to prepare just 1/4 cup of dry beans... so regardless of what either "water" or "bean-water" adds and doesn't add... it's all getting crazy. I understand the initial question to be, "How much should I measure these cooked beans as -- in order to get the same NI that the package states?" I.e., Do I pull out 1/2 cup of cooked beans to get the same nutrients, 3/4 cup or 1 full cup... because one respondent said that beans can double or even quadruple. As far as measuring in the end... don't you people have families and lives? I mean, are you really going to measure out 12.5 servings and what, freeze them individually? OMG so much work for a cup of beans. I can't calculate that one daughter gets 1.25 cups being inactive and the other gets 1.50 being mildly active, and my wife getting 0.75 cups because she just has an office job. PS: I am here now (on this website) after recently becoming diabetic and the more you learn about food and calculations, the more it becomes overwhelming!!! Ughhh... Need iPhone converter app