This is a story about my maiden voyage into preparing beans. It always seemed like a lot of delayed gratification so I never really ventured down that road. After the last four days I can assure you, it is a lot of delayed gratification.
I own a copy of Nourishing Traditions, a cookbook by Sally Fallon. It’s been a wonderful resource to me, and quite enjoyable to thumb through the pages that sandwich each side of the recipes. Lots of anecdotes, factoids, and excerpts about nutrition and health can be found in the margins. I recently bought a bag of black beans thinking it was a good shelf-stable item and that I ought to keep it in supply. My only experience in preparing beans was limited to popping open a can of refried ones. And even then that was very seldom.
I cracked open the cookbook to the index and look up the beans section. All sorts of recipe options, but most importantly, the chapter opens with some info about beans and legumes, and how best to prepare them to be safely digestible and tasty. Combining the parts and pieces of the understanding I had, I started by washing the beans and soaking them for more than 24 hours in a bath of water and whey. I was pretty pumped about where this was going on day one. The water turned this radiant violet color as the black skins leaked into the hot bath. I was on to things!
Following the recipe for Baked Beans French Style, a “unique” preparation where the beans are cooked in oil and not water, I read on that the beans ought to be soaked for 12 hours, drained, and soaked for another 12 hours. I left the beans soaking in hot water and whey for 24 hours straight — I figured I was good on that. I was still confident at this point. The recipe called for the beans to be baked with a can of tomato paste, garlic, and thyme in olive oil, at 300 degrees for 6 hours. I didn’t have tomato paste, and I never made it before, so I just grabbed some frozen Romas from the last harvest and reduced those down with the garlic and thyme before combing the beans in the oil. It looked good and smelled real good. Still confident.
The house smelled like my grandpas. Three hours pass at 300 degrees… turned up the heat to 350 for another hour. That’s four hours. Ah, what the hell, turn it up to 400, they seem to be doing just fine. They were cooking in this crappy, but often used counter-top oven. The temperature knob spins in circles sometimes, but I’m pretty sure that once I find the starting point and it clicks in to place, I’ve found oven-temp-zero. So… who knows, maybe 400 is actually 350, what can it hurt? At the end of hour 4 it’s really time for bed, somewhere around 11pm. So I turn it off for the night and decide I’ll do the last two hours in the morning. After all, this thing is kinda crappy. Safety first! My fire-fighter, knob-checking, dad would be proud of this I think.
Now it’s day three, cool… we’re eating delicious beans tonight. Beans that I made from SCRATCH! Setting the oven to 400 and for one hour, since it only stays on for one hour at a time before the dial needs to be turned again, I let it continue to bake and think about how delicious it’s going to be once the beans have softened. I would taste test the liquid, and try a bean here and there to see where it was on the done timeline. It just didn’t seem to be working. Okay, one more hour to go, I think, this must be the bean sweet spot. The recipe did say they are less mushy than a bean baked in water, so… maybe they were just al dente, and this was “french style.”
At the end of hour 6, I open the foil that covered the baking pan and stuck a metal spoon in to stir the beans. I heard an immediate clink. It sounded like I was stirring marbles or beach rocks. They turned back into rocks! OMG! No no no. I taste-tested a bean. Crunch. It disintegrated in my mouth like munching on a roasted coffee bean. I could have fallen to my knees and wailed at this moment of realization. I just french-fried-the-fuck out of these beans. I poured efforts and intent into this recipe for THREE DAYS… And all that olive oil, those Roma tomatoes that grew in the garden. What a waste.
I couldn’t stop there. They need water. They’re beans, they’ll just keep soaking up water right? I went triage mode on this well of beans, there has to be a way to breathe life back into them, I thought. Beans in the blender, STAT! Water to the top, pulse and then blend the heck out of it. The bean porridge tasted kind of like what I would imagine chewing on a spent campfire log would be like. After transferring to a pot on the stove, I added lemon juice and a cup of yogurt to try and mellow out the flavor of char. It did seem to help but definitely wasn’t enjoyable. At this point, I realize I keep adding things to this black bean abyss and I’m just not sure at what point I’ve crossed the threshold of no return. Day one? Anyway, I add a couple more valuable spices and grate some frozen jalapenos into that abyss. If this doesn’t reduce down to a delicious refried black bean dish, well… I’ll be scarred for life.
End of day three just before calling it a day, the beans have softened, the texture isn’t like crunching coffee anymore, but the flavor is just too damn roasty. It’s NOT a soup. It’s NOT a refried beans side dish. I feel like I should “accidentally” (big air quotes) drop the pot while putting it in the refrigerator. I don’t though, only because I don’t want to clean up the mess, but at this point, I believe these beans are doomed, and I’ve just done a huge belly flop. I sulk, and slither up the stairs to my studio space, hop on Google Hangouts and tell this story to my culinary friend Dave who’s always experimenting and quite adjusted to delayed-gratification-cooking.
At the end of my long-sulking-lament, culinary friend Dave says, as if the next step in a recipe, “and then back in the blender with Tahini to make the world’s most wild humus.”
Inspiration!
No Tahini in the house, but in the freezer is a giant bag of Keweenaw grown black walnuts my friend Desiree gave me right before I moved to St. Paul. She calls them Deez Nutz, and protects them fiercely. I’m used to delayed gratification at this point and feeling quite invigorated with the prospects of rescuing all the energetic input in this porridge. I literally see the light in the distance, as the sun is starting to fall below the horizon on the fourth day. I set up my cracking station with potholder for cushion and to prevent projectile shells from scattering the kitchen, a weighty hammer, tweezers, and a bowl for sorting the walnut meat from the shell pieces. A very tedious task, but also kind of like playing the Milton Bradley game, Operation, mixed with Whack-a-mole, so I’m having a pretty good time. About an hour of whacking and sorting, I have one cup of walnuts ready to be blended into a floral, sweet, heavenly paste.
Two parts black bean abyss porridge, one part walnut butter. Zip zip zip. Both I and this elixir have become renewed. I think to myself, poor sons-of-bitches allergic to walnuts. I took some pornographic photos of the final assembly in the lasting hours of evening light, swooned to myself, and dunked some chips in there, relieved. The flavor is magical. And complex, as it should be. And surprisingly sweet with the walnuts. A tonic for sure. The walnut oil alone has to be worth a couple extra years of life.
I guess, never give up is my lesson here. And if you feel like giving up, or you don’t know where you’re going or what you’re doing, connect with a friend, mix (blend) it up, add some high-quality ingredients and see if the outcome doesn’t become sweeter than originally thought. I think this is an allegory for life.