Adzuki beans substitutes

The closest savoury match and the swap to make for soups, chillies, rice dishes and salads. Small red beans are almost the same size and only slightly less sweet. Kidney beans are much larger and have thicker, tougher skins, so a dish that had little beans scattered through it now has big beans in it, and the flavour reads as more standard bean and less nutty-sweet. Both hold their shape better than adzuki, which is useful in a stew and unhelpful in a paste.

Best for

soups and stews, rice and bean dishes, salads, chilli

Dried kidney beans must be boiled hard for at least ten minutes before simmering, not just slow-cooked from raw. Canned beans are already safe and just need warming.

The best substitute when you are making a paste or filling, because black beans are similarly starchy and mash to the same smooth, thick, spoonable consistency with the same amount of sugar. Two clear changes: the paste comes out near-black rather than reddish-brown, which is visible through mochi or a bun, and the flavour is slightly more earthy and mineral, less chestnut-sweet. A little extra sugar and a pinch of salt closes most of the flavour gap.

Best for

sweet bean paste and buns, mochi and dumpling fillings, soups, stews

Push the cooked beans through a sieve if you want a very smooth paste; black bean skins are tougher than adzuki skins and are the main texture giveaway.

The traditional filling bean across much of Southeast Asia and southern China, so this is not a compromise so much as a different classic. They cook quickly, have no skins to strain out, and mash into a very smooth, pale gold paste that tastes cleaner and sweeter than adzuki, with none of the chestnut depth. In a bun or a mooncake it is lovely; in a bowl of Japanese zenzai it will taste and look wrong, because that dish is about the beans themselves.

Best for

sweet fillings for buns and cakes, smooth pastes, sweet soups

They break down fast and can scorch. Cook them with plenty of water and stir the bottom of the pan once they thicken.

An underrated savoury swap. They are mottled pink-red when dry, cook to a soft, creamy, slightly sweet interior, and mash well, so they work in both stews and rough sweet fillings. They are two to three times the size of an adzuki bean and turn beige-brown when cooked, so the finished dish loses the little red beans look completely, and the flavour is nuttier and more chestnut-like than beany, which is actually quite close to adzuki.

Best for

stews and braises, salads, rough bean pastes, soups

Canned borlotti are widely available in Italian sections and save an hour of cooking.

If the recipe was heading towards paste anyway, buying it in a tin or tube from an Asian grocer skips two hours of simmering and is what a great many home cooks in Japan actually do. It is already sweetened, usually more heavily than a home-made paste, so cut any sugar the recipe adds. Sold as tsubuan when it is chunky and koshian when it is smooth, so pick to match the recipe.

Best for

mochi, dorayaki, buns and pastries, shaved ice and dessert toppings

Check the sweetness by tasting before you add anything. Some brands are close to jam, and an over-sweet filling is the most common problem with shop-bought paste.

Some dishes are the bean. Sekihan, the Japanese red rice for celebrations, gets both its pink colour and its flavour from adzuki cooking liquid; kidney beans give a duller brown-red and a bean flavour that fights the rice. Zenzai and shiruko are essentially sweetened adzuki in a bowl. For these, either find adzuki beans, which most Asian and many health-food shops stock cheaply, or make something else. A substitution here does not produce a slightly different version of the dish; it produces a dish that is not recognisably the same thing.

Best for

nothing, this is the case where you should wait for the right bean

Canned cooked adzuki beans, sold plain or lightly sweetened, are the practical shortcut and keep the dish honest.