Magic Beans

In this time between the holidays, I find myself craving simple healthy foods that are still warming.  I also miss Mexican food in a big way, as growing up in California, Mexican food is more accurately categorized as “food.”  I’ve pretty much given up on the corn products here in the UK – the tortilla chips are heavy and stale, corn tortillas non-existent, and my attempts to make my own have been thwarted by the fact that the only masa I can find is out of date.  While London has a lot of food from all over the world, its Mexican food is sorely lacking.

That’s not to say that all is lost.  Many of the foods commonly used in Mexican cuisine – chile, lime, cilantro, cumin, are also beloved by other cultures that have relocated here.  And for reasons I cannot yet explain, among the large variety of beans at the local Turkish grocery store, I have found pinto beans.  Someone else must be eating the pinto beans, but the clerk has asked me before what I was planning on doing with the beans.  I think she thought I was being sassy when I told her I was going to cook and eat them, but I didn’t know what else to say. 

If you’re thinking that cooking beans is not that exciting, then you may want to make sure you’ve actually had properly prepared beans before you write them all off.  Canned beans or freeze-dried reconstituted beans served at Taco Bell and many other restaurants don’t count.  Neither do rapidly pressure-cooked beans with a bunch of “seasonings” tossed in to mask the fact that they have no flavor.  We’re talking beans here – a staple food for large segments of the world’s population that have the advantage of being cheap and tasty.

The method here can be used for most any variety of beans.  Note -  if you’re using kidney beans you may want to ignore what I say below and soak them for several hours followed by boiling for at least 10 minutes to avoid a nasty form of food poisoning.

Frijoles de la Olla – Soupy Beans (aka “Beans”)

First find your beans.  Pinto beans are the old standby for me, though black beans or the small red Central American beans that are the size of black beans and the color of kidney beans are also good, as are pink beans.  Beans that aren’t all old and extra dry are better, but you may not have a choice.

Once you have your beans, take a pound of them (2 cups, small bag) and sort through them.  Sometimes a stone manages to sneak in – get rid of these.  Wash the beans – either in a strainer or put in a bowl or pan and fill with water.  Make sure to wash them good as sometimes in the drying process the dirt gets caked on.  If you’re soaking them in a bowl, after a minute or so, you might notice that the first beans to float to the top are some sort of mutant duds – mere bean skins, funny looking miscolored hard little beans – toss these things out.  (If you’re just using a strainer, don’t worry, you can do this once they’re in the pot).  Regardless, get rid of any unbeanlike beans – some batches have one, some, more like twenty.

That’s it, strain the beans and put in a good-sized pot.  What? No overnight soak?  Won’t they take forever to cook?  Won’t I fart endlessly?  Possibly, but 1) they take a long time regardless, 2) if you’re worried about wind, you probably don’t eat enough beans, and 3) you want them to taste good, right?  Then don’t wash away all their beaniness with pre-soak.  (Washing in a bowl of water is not pre-soaking them, though see scary note about kidney beans above.)

One more thing, while I generally try to not obsess over kitchen gear, if you do have a ceramic lined pot (like a fancy dutch oven), use this rather than a metal pot.  If not, forget I said anything and go back to your beans.  It’s fine.  Really. 

Now that your beans are in the pot, add some water.  Generally for a pound of beans, 2-3 quarts of water is what you need, but honestly, I’ve never measured.  Go for a couple of inches of water over the beans – you can add some hot water later if too much disappears.

The only essential ingredients are the beans and the water at this point, but many people add a couple teaspoons of lard, oil, or a tiny bit of bacon or grease, and part of an onion.  You can also toss in a clove of garlic, cilantro, ½ cup of beer (for frijoles borachos), or other fanciness, or if you’re doing black beans, toss in epazote if you can find it.  But really, it’s the beans that have the flavor, so don’t go overboard with anything.  Anything you do add will be cooked to oblivion, so do yourself a favor and leave it in large pieces that can easily be pulled out later.  I generally add a half an onion cut in half, a clove of garlic, and if I have lard or bacon, a tiny bit of that – otherwise I skip it.

(Basic beans ready to go)

 When I first learned to make beans in Mexico I was told to add the salt at the end and given some sort of explanation about the skins getting hard if it went in to early.  I still follow this advice, but plenty of people add the salt at this point with no disaster.  

Bring your pot of beans to a boil, then lower to a simmer and cover.  Once simmering, you want the heat low enough so there’s still some action in the pot, but no higher.  Now if you’re like me and tend to get distracted so you’re not really sure when the beans actually started to boil, don’t panic, they’ll be fine.  On the other hand, don’t think you can speed up the beans by boiling them to death – you’re not going to be eating them today anyway.

Over the next couple of hours, give a peak from time to time to make sure there’s still enough water in the pot.  If the beans aren’t covered with liquid or you’d like a bit more, add some boiling water (don’t want to mess with the cooking temperature).  Just don’t make them too watery or the broth won’t be very tasty.  It should be cloudy.  Think of it as a bean soup – you want a lot of beans with the broth, not a couple beans floating in a pool. 

Once you’ve cooked them for 2 hours start checking on the beans for doneness.  Pintos can take 2-3 hours, some other varieties longer.  The time depends on the dryness of the beans, the level of heat, your altitude, and if you need to leave home anytime soon.  Fish out a couple of beans – if they’re soft like a bean, they’re done.

(Some time later they've magically transmutated.)

 At or near the end, add a couple teaspoons to a tablespoon of salt.  It may seem like a lot, but remember, there’s not much else in there.

That’s it – you’re done.  But for some reason, they just won’t be as good as they will be tomorrow.  Once the pot has cooled off enough, fish out mushy onion or other bits and put it in the fridge (or be organized and put it in a container in the fridge). 

Now that you have beans – what are you going to do with them?  Once reheated, you can eat them just like this with their broth plain or with some cheese, chopped tomato, onion, cilantro, or chile.  You can scoop out some beans and toss them in soup, salad, chili, or burritos. You can eat them as a side with dinner or with your eggs at breakfast. You can stick half in the freezer.  You can put them in a frying pan and reduce the liquid making for a richer bean. 

Sopa Tarasca (Tarascan Soup)

In the only actual cooking class I ever had, we learned to make Sopa Tarasca – a pureed bean soup.  The class was in central Mexico and this was a regional specialty:

Broil two tomatoes in the oven or char in a pan on the stovetop.  Blend with a clove of garlic and about half of a small chopped onion.  Pour this mixture into a pan coated with hot oil and let it cook for a few minutes.  While its cooking, puree a couple cups of cooked beans with their broth and pour this into the cooking tomato mixture.  After a couple more minutes add some chicken or other broth.  Soup.  Yum.  Top with crumbly cheese. 

Frijoles Refritos  (Refried Beans)

Finally, you can make refried beans.  When I say I miss Mexican food, this is usually what I’m thinking of – the smell of beans frying on the stove and burning corn tortillas. 

First, a word on the frying.  A while back everyone became paranoid about fried foods and what they were fried in.  Refried beans, through a misunderstanding of the word refrito (we’ll leave the linguistic lesson for another day) were somehow branded as a terrible fatty food - never mind their protein, magnesium, potassium, iron, folate, or thiamin content.   Mexican restaurants all over the U.S. were forced to make their beans with vegetable shortening or oil and advertise them as lard-free.  Now, if you’ve never made refried beans, you may have imagined that the beans were somehow mashed and deep-fried or that the mushy goodness holding the beans together somehow involved large amounts of lard.  It does not. 

Even if you make refried beans with lard, you only need a tablespoon or so and they turn out fine, and probably with less fat than most meats.  While some rogue restaurants may have been adding copious amounts of fat to their beans, if you start with good beans, there’s no reason for this.  Though if you like lard, don’t let me stop you  - you can easily add a quarter cup to the batch described below. 

First, very finely chop a small chunk of onion (quarter of a smallish one).  Put your desired fat (lard, drippings, vegetable oil, a bit of Mexican chorizo) in a frying pan and sauté the onion on high heat until translucent.  Keep the pan on high heat and pour in several cups of beans and their liquid – enough to fill the pan but give you room to work with (about half of the soupy beans you just made).  Then, take a potato masher and start mashing the beans in the pan.  If you don’t have a potato masher, you can use a large spoon or anything clean and heat safe with a long enough handle to keep your hand out of the hot beans.  You can also sieve the beans if you want them pureed as they do in Southern Mexico and parts of Central America, but you’d want to do this beforehand.

Once you’re done mashing (when it’s at the consistency you like), step away.  Let the beans keep cooking at high heat (watch out for burning hot bean sputters) until enough of the liquid has cooked off so they’re at the consistency you like.  Add some salt if you think it needs more (depends on how salty the beans are).  I tend to stir it a bit to avoid burning on the bottom and edges of the pan or maybe just because I’m inpatient.

That’s it.  Frijoles refritos.  Done proper.  While this may seem too simple to be tasty, you’ve actually just reduced the broth from the beans into a rich paste.  That’s where the much of the flavor lies, not in piles of imaginary lard.  If you’re making them vegetarian they will still have more flavor made this way than anything you can buy in a can. 

(Nearly done refried beans - might not look like much but it's tasty)

If you need to reheat them later and find them too dry, just add a splash of water to the pot you’re reheating in and stir it into the beans.  I like to eat them with chips and not bother making anything else. J