I love beans, especially creamy, flavourful beans that come with a thick, delicious broth. This is my favourite pantry recipe, and it was the very first thing I made sure I had ingredients for when I started self-isolating. Thankfully, there are only two essentials: beans and fat. The rest of this dish is made by throwing in everything including the kitchen sink. It’s a little bit different every time, but it’s always good — so good I have literally scooped it off The Cascade office floor and eaten it in front of all my coworkers — and that was when you could still get groceries.
Ingredients:
1.5 cups of your favourite dry bean (I recommend white navy beans or lima beans)
A lot of cooking fat (I like to mix olive oil and sesame oil, but animal fats like from bacon or beef drippings work great)
Spices (whatever you’ve got; I like dried basil, cayenne pepper, tarragon, and cumin)
Garlic, to taste
Onion, to taste
Any flavourful produce that’s on its way out (tomatoes, lemons, fresh herbs — you name it)
Method:
- Soak your beans overnight in enough water to cover them by about two inches; use the pot you’ll cook them in.
- In the morning, add more water if your beans are no longer covered.
- Bring the beans to boil, skimming off the foam as the temperature comes up.
- Peel and crush your garlic cloves, halve your onion, and give anything else you’re throwing in a smush or a chop to open them up. If you’re using fresh herbs, you can bundle them to make them easy to fish out later.
- Toss in a generous pinch of salt, your garlic, your produce, and as much seasoning as you can add in good conscience. Beans don’t have a lot of flavour, so this is your chance to make them actually taste like something. Don’t waste it.
- This is the most important step: add your cooking fat until there’s an inch of fat floating on top of your water. If that’s more fat than you want to leave in your broth, you can freeze it after straining your beans out; scrape the hard fat off the broth and use it as a seasoned cooking oil. This amount of fat is necessary to make the beans smooth and creamy inside rather than dry and gritty.
- Reduce heat to low and just barely simmer until delicious, tasting and re-seasoning frequently.
These beans come out pretty oily, so I usually make a big pot of rice and mix the two so the rice absorbs the excess oil and seasoning. It’s also good to brighten up the flavour with a bit of lime or lemon juice, or even vinegar. Serve it with sour cream and crisp-fried mushrooms, if you can find such luxuries.
Image: Mikaela Collins/The Cascade
