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^^^ bay leaves certainly do something, if you don't use bay leaves in most recipes where you're used to having them, it's a very notable difference! I skimmed through this thread, and it seems as though it's mostly concentrated around black beans, red beans, and various sweet bean or pseudo-chili recipes. I live on the west coast where you can't shake a stick without hitting a burrito cart or taco truck, and frankly nobody gives a drat about baked beans or chili that I've ever met around these parts, so I have always wanted to perfect the art of making pinto beans and refried beans, with that velvety creamy texture that makes for perfect burritos and such. My mom grew up on them so she was always great at it however, she didn't really go out of her way to teach me anything about it, so I was left to pick up a crockpot (or three, or four.. God you should see the back corners of my kitchen cabinets  ) and fumble around with things myself.. Note! this recipe doesn't use a crock pot, because i've found I'd rather spend a couple hours cooking my beans than leaving them on all day and hoping they came out the way I intended..! I use a lot of cheap and bulk beans including reservation food supplies, and sometimes with old beans, you can get better results with a real pot and a stove, than a slow cooker. Burrito Truck-Style Pintos - time: overnight soak, plus 2 - 4 hours cook time. makes 4-6 quarts, depending on size of cook pot. First things first: rinse (two or three times) and then soak the pintos overnight if at all possible, expect them to gain about 50% bulk, so make sure to leave plenty of water covering them, and don't fill the container most than maybe 2/3 of the way up, so they don't start falling out onto the counter while you're asleep. Beans are filthy. Once you soak them, toss them into a colander and rinse them another time or two. Now we just go to to it, throw the beans into the pot, throw in enough water to cover them with a couple inches (they won't bulk up any more, so if you use too much water now, you'll have bean soup - which is good, but then I'd throw in a couple big hamhocks and bell peppers and onions and serve it in bowls,) of water. Chop up a small onion and throw it in - it'll dissolve completely, (if you want onion chunks to remain and have texture, toss another half or whole onion an hour or so before they're done, but we're going for velvety reefers, not soup, today). Throw in a couple/few cloves or garlic, or a couple/few tablespoons of garlic powder. No salt yet. Throw in a tablespoon or two of cumin, and some paprika (I like smoked paprika). now the secret ingredient *drumroll* chorizo! They sell 1 lb chaws of pork or beef chorizo for roughly $1 around here, so it's way more cost-effective than hamhocks, and I prefer the texture and small amount of spice the chorizo adds. You could probably skip it entirely, or use soyrizo (I love soyrizo.) Get out your big wooden spoon and smash that chorizo to bits - really, dump it in the water before it's gotten too hot, and then just bash it until there's no bite-sized pieces left, it will dissolve into the beans and be almost undetectable when finished. Now, cover and heat until you get a good boil (stir every once in a while, to make sure nothing sticks to the bottom and scorches), and then IMMEDIATELY reduce to simmer, gap the lid and then leave on a simmer for a couple hours. Once the beans have simmered for a while (you did gap the lid right? or else you'll have greasy spatters all over the pot and the stove!) you will notice that they will form an oily, bubbly foam on top, similar to sea foam but brown/red. Get a large spoon and skim as much of this foam off the top as you can (without stirring! If you stir they'll dissipate again and give you worse gas) and throw it away however you deem fit. Stir things a bit, check the bottom for scorched stuff(if anything scorches and burns to the bottom you'll have to be very careful to not scrape it off the bottom while cooking, or it'll make it all taste burnt), taste it and see if you need anything - now is the safe time to add salt to taste, hot sauces, more garlic, cumin, etc. Cook for a while longer, until the beans are the right consistency and doneness when you eat some. Now... Get out your potato masher! I had used this thing maybe once in my entire life to make potatoes until one day I realized that I could skip the "refry" part of refried beans, and just use the potato masher to smoosh a bunch of them and thicken up the consistency of my beans!  Be careful using it, if you have burnt crap on the bottom and you get too enthusiastic spinning or moving it back and forth, you could scrape up more charred crap - burnt beans are unsalvageable once you scrape the charcoal off the bottom and get it into the rest of the mix, but it's easy to pour off most of the good beans and then clean out the burnt portions later on if you managed to do this - I still do it about every third time I cook beans. Let it sit a little bit, and they're ready to eat!I make large batches of beans because I like to store them in medium-large rubbermaid containers and then freeze them and thaw as needed - they can easily last most of a month if I make a burrito for breakfast most days. Sorry I don't have a like, measured out recipe.. My roommate literally uses a digital scale to measure his ingredients while cooking - but I also noticed he can only make about 3 total recipes and must have his cookbook handy, so I've worked a lot at just guesstimating most things I cook - it helps a ton with improvisation when you are short of ingredients or need to use something before it goes south on you. If anybody is interested I would be happy to write everything down the next time I make a pot of beans, I used the last of them up the other day. wormil posted:I put tomatoes in with dry beans all the time, the beans soften. Myth busted. 22 Eargesplitten posted:Huh. I was making this: http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/alton-brown/the-once-and-future-beans-recipe.html coyo7e fucked around with this message at 00:53 on Aug 4, 2015 |
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Aug 3, 2015 19:52
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Mr. Wiggles posted:Epazote will help those beans a bit, too. Not just flavor, but in the "might give you gas" department. 
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Aug 4, 2015 00:54
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Also ugh, I didn't realize my "recipe" was a tl;dr WoT abortion. Maybe I need to stop posting so early in the day before I'm drunk and feelin' reductive..! I'll make a pot of beans tomorrow and make things right, apologies. I'm just too used to "throw a handful of this and half a handful of that" measuring. Also, loving god I ramble on and I deleted 1/4 of the text I typed up before posting and it still was that damned long..!   I don't think it gets much more po' folks than a bag of beans straight from the reservation "commodds" and a couple of mean little onions. Gonna make divine burritos tomorrow morning, though!  edit: the water on the beans is really low because they are ALREADY mostly soaked and bulked-up, I added water to them twice.. The smaller pot was originally half-full but these are fresher than I'm used to so they were about to overwhelm the (4 quart?) little Reverware I was soaking them in..
coyo7e fucked around with this message at 05:52 on Aug 4, 2015 |
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Aug 4, 2015 05:44
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Spoiler: dried beans take more effort and may not taste as good as pre-seasoned and pre-cooked canned beans (which were probably dried beans anyway).
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Feb 16, 2016 05:25
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wormil posted:Thanks, I'd never heard of borscht. No one else in the family would eat it. My wife's idea of soup is Campbells. My youngest daughter said it was too spicy but I think she was put off by the color, she's never been a fan of red foods (in her mind, red=spicy). My oldest daughter decided she doesn't like beets. My in-laws are coming to visit, die hard Irish Americans, and I'm sure they've never eaten anything like it so I plan on making it again while they are here. I'm always secretly glad when no else likes my concoctions because then I get to eat it all week. Butternut squash really doesn't need anything else though when you cook it - they're flavorful enough that it's almost a waste to add them into something else, imho. There are plenty of lesser squash which need assloads of brown sugar and butter etc to make them palatable, which I would use in a soup before a butternut. My family from the midwest make amazing pickled beets, I'm literally planning on going to Nebraska again just to glean the recipe from my great-aunts etc.
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Mar 2, 2016 07:33
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You could make some rad hummus with those chickpeas
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Mar 3, 2016 05:28
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I hate soaking beans because I always realize I want to cook beans in the morning, which means I have to soak them all day and cook them late enough in the evening that it's either after supper, or I end up eating super late. Yes I've got a pressure cooker and can cook them without soaking but I prefer them soaked and cleaned. That is all.
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Mar 25, 2016 20:23
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Butch Cassidy posted:Soak them then pressure cook.  As I said, I prefer to not use the pressure cooker 
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Mar 28, 2016 05:42
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Thoht posted:Out of curiosity, why not? It's pretty much "I need to get a new one out of the original box and read the manual before I play with it," because I literally have had more than one with just random wingnuts in place of the actual ones, and recipes I look up online vary so drastically in cooking times and heat etc, that I'd rather not blow myself up (or at least, my stovetop). It only takes maybe 2 or 3 hours to cook a good pot of beans after a nice lazy soak, depending on the freshness and what gets thrown in when (I put in too much bullion too early in my last batch and the skins are hard enough I just decided to make it dogfood for instance - but hey the dog's happy and it's cheaper than her normal food), and I'm just not in that much of a hurry I guess..? At this point though, I'm basically just going to quietly toss my gifted+used pressure cookers into the garbage/recycle/goodwill, because I have had enough things literally explode in kitchens I was in, that I'm terribly afraid of ending up looking like two-face or some poo poo. 
coyo7e fucked around with this message at 08:20 on Mar 30, 2016 |
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Mar 30, 2016 08:16
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Jewel Repetition posted:It's definitely possible that they're ancient, they take forever to cook even in purified water after full soaking, and some of them are shriveled. I got them for like two cents per pound from a rural store. Beans aren't like meat where it can smell a bit off and you can spice it up and ignore it. If your beans don't smell righteous then flush them ASAP
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Sep 6, 2016 01:45
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QuarkMartial posted:I'm skimming throughout the thread, but anyone have recommendations for beans to make for burritos? Cook them until they're toothsome, then grab a potato masher and smash them around until they thicken up a bit. Remember that they get thicker when they cool down so don't be afraid to add a little water when reheating.
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Oct 6, 2016 20:45
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You'd probably wanna thaw the broccoli first, because frozen veggies might have extra water in them. I do a similar recipe except with diced fresh jalapenos and a generous helping of shredded cheddar cheese. That's a hell of a lot of butter for me though lol
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Oct 11, 2016 20:50
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Salt is tough. I was taught as a kid that salt is a "flavor binder" so I should only ever use just enough until I could taste the other ingredients that I *meant* to bring out the taste of. Nowadays, if you don't have absurd levels of salt, then a lot of prepacked foods are literally inedible. Salt both covers the tastes of a lot of horriad stuff from automated processing (metallic flavors etc) as well as encouraging the flavors of more desirable stuff.
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Jan 12, 2017 08:24
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Butch Cassidy posted:Someone else made some dish of garbanzo beans a ndquinoa that was delicious but couldn't find them to ask for a recipe. QUinoa is a whole grain, garbanzos are protein, and a little bit of oil and veggies rounds everything out nicely.
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Feb 6, 2017 04:01
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It's been too hot lately to want to eat a hot bowl of beans, so yesterday I put together a cold penne pasta salad with navy beans, steamed fresh veggies, tuna, and pesto.
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Jun 29, 2017 18:57
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better water down those two jalapenos, poo poo's gettin' wild
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Jul 7, 2017 03:21
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Are you placing whole jalapenos in and then pureeing with a food processor? The seeds are where the vast majority of the heat is, but I'd imagine the cayenne is where most of the spice in that recipe comes from even if you were chopping up the seeds too.
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Jul 11, 2017 01:12
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^^^ What the gently caress? There was no meat at all? Take a picture of the hocks next time. I got at least a cup and a half of meat out of the smoked neckbones I used the other day, although I got a ton of sharp little bones as well and it was a lot more effort than hocks. I usually go with hocks because I can rely on them. I assume your technique is alright, at pulling the meat out of the fat and bones with proper utensils like a pair of forks and returning the bits of meat before serving, right? Maybe it was a fluke, like the chorizo I bought that someone had overdone the mole sauce on, so it tasted like some sort of weird dessert sausage with cocoa.. wormil posted:I'm very fond of smoked ham hocks or smoked pork neck bones in my beans. When the soup is done I fish them out and pick them apart, returning meat to the soup but in some ways they are a PITA. The ham hocks are mostly bone, fat, and skin, the neck bones have a lot of small bones and inevitably some end up in the soup. Also have noticed that smoked ham hocks vary a lot in quality. They look the same on the outside but some are meaty and others are skin and bone. Do you guys just deal with it or using something else like smoked sausage? I like neck bones ok enough, but the small bones are really obnoxious and can be quite sharp and hard to distinguish. edit: I don't care about the skin, I hate skin so it always gets picked and thrown out - usually attached to chunks of fat. The "skin and bone" you're talking about are, I believe, just a lower cut on the leg bone, I believe. coyo7e fucked around with this message at 22:35 on Jul 15, 2017 |
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Jul 15, 2017 22:24
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Man up and ask the butcher at your local store, for real. You could start off by being like, "so I keep buying these thinking they'll be meaty but they're not - is there something else I ought to be looking for, or are these just lovely?" Maybe there's some regional butchery bullcrap where hocks means broth bones or something who knows. I mentioned at a local grocery that I couldn't find smoked hamhocks anywhere in town and within a month, they were stocking them.
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Jul 17, 2017 04:23
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Dude what is wrong with the pigs where you live..? 2.50 a lb is a little high but reasonable. Do you have a like, poor folks' local grocery? Maybe a Latin butcher? Or for real ask to talk to the butcher or meat buyer at your regular market and ask why the smoked jocks are so crappy, they probably don't know but will want to.
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Jul 29, 2017 05:17
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I forgot to post this, but THIS is a ham hock mate.  This is what they meant if you ever read "fists like ham shanks" in some old book.   If you look at the bottom half, you can see the bulbous-looking bit? That's good solid lean chunks of meat. The other part that looks similar but flat, is that bone sheared flat. You wanna look for those bulgy bits that poke out past the skin, and make sure that the stuff you see from the end isn't just pure old bone. coyo7e fucked around with this message at 01:04 on Aug 12, 2017 |
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Aug 12, 2017 00:32
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Yeah that's crappy. I literally bought that from wal mart.  Honestly though whenever you see an employee in a knee length white smock, ask them for ham hocks. I've had p good return on effort, usually after 2 or 3 asks it shows up in a few weeks.. But you better buy the he'll out of them for a few months, maybe talk up a few customers about POT BEANS... Or find who the store manager is and butter them up mercilessly.. That works as well!
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Aug 12, 2017 07:21
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