Navy beans

One US cup of navy beans weighs 208 grams (7.3 ounces). Going the other way, 100 grams is about 0.48 cups.

Also called pea beans, haricot beans, dried navy beans, dry navy beans, white pea beans.

Dried beans, lentils and peas compared: cup weights side by side, the source behind each, and why they differ.

A cup of dry navy beans weighs 208 g (7.3 oz), the heaviest cup of any dry bean on this site. USDA, the USDA Food Buying Guide and Bob's Red Mill's label fall within 8.3% of each other, so this entry publishes USDA's figure.

Navy beans, also called pea beans or haricot beans, are a small, white, slightly flattened oval variety of the common bean (Phaseolus vulgaris). The name comes from the US Navy, which has served them to sailors since the nineteenth century. They are the bean in Boston baked beans, the US Senate's navy bean soup and canned baked beans in tomato sauce, and they cook to a soft, creamy texture.

USDA SR Legacy "Beans, navy, mature seeds, raw" (FDC 173745) gives 1 cup = 208 g at 12.1% water. The USDA Food Buying Guide gives 1 lb dry as about 2 1/4 cups, 202 g a cup. Bob's Red Mill's navy beans, in USDA's branded database (FDC 440938), print 1/4 cup as 48 g, 192 g a cup, the lightest of the three; the spread is inside the 10% tolerance for whole seeds. America's Test Kitchen is split: "1 pound dried navy beans (about 2 cups)" in Quicker Boston Baked Beans and "1 pound (2 ½ cups)" in New England Baked Beans, so neither enters as a figure.

The physical check: navy beans are small, under a centimetre long, and small seeds fill a measuring cup more completely than large ones because the cup's walls leave less wasted space around them. At 208 g, a cup is 0.88 g/mL, above the 0.78 to 0.83 g/mL that Paixão and colleagues (2020) measured in bulk for a medium-sized carioca-type bean, as a smaller seed should be. That is why navy beans weigh more per cup than black beans (194 g) and pinto beans (193 g), and well over the large Great Northern beans (183 g), though both are white beans of the same species.

Cooked: USDA's boiled navy bean record (FDC 173746) weighs a cup at 182 g, 64% water. That is a single source, so it is given here rather than published as a second state. The Bean Institute counts a one-pound bag of dry beans as about 6 cups cooked and drained.

Practical guidance: use 208 g per cup of dry navy beans, 104 g per half cup and 52 g per quarter cup; a pound holds about 2 1/4 cups. Use about 182 g per cup of cooked, drained beans. Soak them overnight before cooking. For baked beans, weigh the dry beans, since a pound is the unit most recipes start from, and expect a cup of navy beans to weigh about 14% more than a cup of Great Northern beans if you swap one for the other.