Canned beans are awesome for bulking up a smoky beef chili, boosting the protein content of veggie soups, and mixing with grains to make bean burgers. No matter whether you go for the popular garbanzo bean, the Mexican pinto bean, or the Italian cannellini, there’s always a canned legume to suit your culinary mood. Having said that, some supermarket beans aren’t worth investing in due to their poor texture and flavor. After an extensive taste test, we’ve concluded that the canned beans you should leave on the shelf at Aldi are Dakota’s Pride Great Northern beans.
The loser in our list of 13 canned beans from Aldi, ranked worst to best, these legumes were covered in a gross goop that put us off from the get-go. While we removed all the gunk before tasting them, we couldn’t forget how the beans looked when we first opened the can. They were also extremely mushy and lacked texture. It’s true that canned beans should be cooked well but we prefer them when they still have a little bite and substance to their structure so they can provide satisfying heft to dishes like bean salads and curries. The worst thing about these Great Northern beans? They were still super-salty even after we removed the liquid. This means they wouldn’t be suited to adding to dishes that have already been seasoned well, which is a real problem in our eyes.
Turn to this Dakota’s Pride bean instead
We taste-tested the beans both at room temperature and warmed up to see if there was any difference in flavor and texture (FYI, our taste buds pick up on salt better in warm foods versus very hot or very cold foods). However, Dakota’s Pride Great Northern beans still came out the worst and were still overly salty — not exactly a winning formula for a delectable bean. On the other hand, if you’re looking for a more malleable option — one that tastes just as good at room temperature as it does heated up — look to the top spot of our taste test.
The winner in our taste test was Dakota’s Pride mild chili beans. While these little fellas look like plain Pinto beans, they come packed in a chili sauce and have a balanced and harmonious flavor that isn’t too spicy. We could definitely taste the complexity in the sauce, which likely came from onion powder, cumin, chili pepper, and garlic powder in the ingredients list, making them perfect for tossing straight into a simmering pot of chili as is. However, they were so tasty we’d even recommended eating them straight out of the can as a high-protein snack.
