For Toot-Free Beans There's One Pantry Staple You Need To Add

Beans could almost be the perfect food — they're cheap, protein-packed, plant-based, and they even taste good. What's not to love? Well, they do have one pretty serious drawback. Yes, we're talking about the smelly elephant in the room, which is to say, their gas-producing properties. (We'll refrain from inserting any fart jokes here, instead leaving those to cookbook author Samin Nosrat.) Although releasing the Kraken at the dinner table would be the most quintessentially "Dad" thing ever, even if you're neither male nor a parent, you may prefer to enjoy your chili or cassoulet stink-free by adding a pinch of baking soda to the beans.

Baking soda has a lot of tricks up its sleeve, but one of its lesser-known properties may be its ability to make beans more digestible. The reason beans cause ill winds to blow is because they contain carbohydrates called oligosaccharides that the body has a hard time handling and methane (fart gas) is a byproduct of this difficult digestive process. However, if you add a pinch of baking soda to the bean water, this ingredient's alkalinity will help the beans break down so they can be more easily processed.

If you're soaking dry beans before cooking, add about ¼ teaspoon of baking soda per cup of beans and let them sit for at least eight hours. If you're impatient and skip the soak, add the baking soda directly to the cooking water. It shouldn't impact the flavor but will work its alkaline magic as the beans simmer.

While canned beans tend to be more expensive than their dried counterparts, the good news is that they're slightly less gassy because the commercial canning process reduces the amount of oligosaccharides. The best way to ensure that your canned beans are as fart-free as possible, though, is to rinse them before using. It seems that their fart-producing properties primarily come from the aquafaba, or bean water. (Good news for vegan bakers, though: Canned chickpeas, which are a common source of aquafaba, have the lowest levels of gas-producing oligosaccharides among common legumes.)

You can also cook canned beans with baking soda (about ½ teaspoon per can) as this substance helps soften them and may make them easier to digest. If you want to bring out the big guns, though, you may want to purchase an additional product: the oligosaccharide-destroying supplement alpha-galactosidase, which is found in Bean-Zyme supplements. While the instructions say to take one pill with your first bite of beans, you could also grind up one tablet per serving and stir the powder into your cooked bean dish to de-stink it as much as possible.