If using canned chickpeas, drain and rinse them with water to reduce the sodium (salt) content by almost half. Rinse thoroughly with cold water so that they are easier to digest and produce less gas. To calculate that ratio, I started by taking six different varieties of dried beans, cannellini beans, red beans, pinto beans, black beans, chickpeas and black-eyed peas and measured their volumes and weights before and after cooking them. Conversely, if a recipe calls for 1 cup of dried beans, you'll need to buy two 15-ounce cans to have the more than 2 cups of cooked beans that the recipe will eventually produce.
More than anything else, that means that I prefer dried beans to canned beans, and I'm willing to take the time to soak and cook them for just about any recipe. But for those of us who do want to use dried beans, what do we do when a recipe calls for preservation (or, in less frequent cases, vice versa)? Are there any general rules that apply to all types of beans? A pound of chickpeas more than tripled in weight and had a more significant increase in volume (from just under 3 cups dry to 7 cups once cooked).
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