Does Heinz’s theory that baked beans are best kept upside down apply to all tinned foods? Xanthe Clay puts five popular cans to the test. We’ve been storing our baked bean tins wrong all these years. Or that is what the people at Heinz are saying, and they should know.
It seems we need to be putting the tin in the cupboard upside down – with the ring pull at the bottom. I can’t say I pay much attention to which way up my tins get shoved on the shelf. What difference could it possibly make? The problem, says Heinz, is that when we tip the beans out into a pan, some stay recalcitrantly stuck at the base.
Sure, having to make them move with a spoon is hardly a tragedy even if that metal-on-metal scraping is tooth-jangling. On the scale of first-world problems, it’s somewhere between a leaking cappuccino lid and a nationwide chia seed shortage. But if it’s possible to make beans on toast, the definition of an easy supper, even less hassle, why not do it? The point is that the beans naturally sink to the bottom of the can, sticking together in a gunky mass.
By inverting the tin, the beans will settle at the ring pull end – and be easily dislodged once the lid is removed. It’s important enough that Heinz has released a batch of tins with their labels on upside down, as a sort of bean-based aide-memoire. And it led me to wonder whether this useful hack is transferable.
Should I be storing all my tins upside down?.