Chefs love salt and so do home cooks like me. Never too much salt. But always Just enough so the meals and main dishes we put on the table taste good.
I like convenience and these Mexican Black Beans work for me. You’ll find a couple of pouches in my pantry so when I need to I can put a meal together quickly. Like the shrimp tacos I make using frozen shrimp. Or a meal of rice and black beans and some leftover chicken.
The ingredient list reads like what I use for scratch cooking. The degree of processing is just different. Powdered onion and garlic instead of intact aromatics. Seed oil instead of olive oil. Since the product is industrially formulated with 5 or more ingredients, technically it would be classified as ultra-processed. But clean labeled convenience products made with intact ingredients are always acceptable in my kitchen.
I grew up eating Mexican street food and have always liked the taste of beans. Dietitians and food labelers get all hung up in the discussion of VEGGIES vs PROTEIN food groups. Why do they get so hung up? Because one food can’t be present in two groups. As for me, I don’t have that problem. I say beans or pulses can fit in both groups. Then I sit down and enjoy my dinner.
These Mexican black beans have a moderate amount of salt. How do you know if the amount is moderate? Check the label. A low amount of sodium would be 10% DV. A high amount would be 20%. These Mexican bean are right in the middle at 14%. And that’s just the right amount to taste good to me.
The food police folks will argue the product has too much salt. And that’s technically accurate. To market a food product as “healthy”, the DV should be <10%. As I’ve learned however in my exploration of the disconnect between what the experts tell us to eat & the real food I actually, most of the convenience products that can be labeled “healthy” don’t taste good to me.
Finally for those of you who relate better to numbers than to words, my favorite food app GoCoCo scores the product 10/10.