Spicy Beer-Glazed Black Beans

17Jun10

My friend and coworker Elizabeth loves beans. New and exotic beans, perfectly simple beans, and all the beans in between — beans are the subject of many an office conversation. Hearing her talk about how great homemade beans are made me realize with embarrassment that I’ve never actually made beans from scratch.

Not ever. In my whole life. How could this have happened?!

So, inspired by Elizabeth, and after many discussions on types of pots, soaking time, and cooking methods, I decided to jump headfirst into the world of dried beans. I was a little nervous about it, so I picked the bean that I felt I knew best, and bought a 1 lb bag of everyday black beans.

As it turns out, cooking gorgeous, mouthwatering beans is ridiculously easy. So easy that while eating them I became momentarily enraged by the thought that I’d been eating that flavorless canned crap all these years! But my rage couldn’t last long — the perfect, smooth texture and full, delicious flavor of the beans I was eating quickly lulled me back into serenity.

We’re big fans of beer in our house — my husband is something of a beer connoisseur (in fact, he’s promised to start writing a regular beer review column here on Happy Appetite, so please keep your eyes open for the soon-to-debut “Hoppy Appetite” entries). And beans are among our long list of beer-accompanied foods, so when we saw a recipe for beer-glazed beans in Mark Bittman’s How to Cook Everything Vegetarian, we were pretty much sold from the get-go. We used Guinness for an especially velvety, rich flavor, and then kicked it up a notch with a couple Serrano peppers. We served it topped with grated cheddar cheese for a truly luxurious bean dish. The beans were fabulous plain, but this recipe really took them to a whole new level.

Cooking dried black beans:

Rinse and pick through 1 lb of black beans. Discard any weird looking beans or pebbles. Find a medium-large pot with a lid that fits. Place the beans in the pot and cover them with cold water by at least a few inches. Put the lid on, and let them soak for 8ish hours. Once they’re soaked, drain the water and test a bean. At this point they will be soft, but raw and kind of crumbly feeling in your mouth. It’s important to get a sense of the raw bean’s texture now so you’ll be able to tell where they are in the cooking process later.

Add water to the pot again, this time covering the beans by about 2 inches. Bring the water just to a boil, then cover and reduce the heat as low as you can possibly make it. On my stove, this means that the beans don’t really even bubble — the heat is so low that only the occasional bubble comes up. Every 20 or 30 minutes, taste a bean to test for tenderness. If you have the heat as low as I did, it will likely take several hours to reach that tenderness, but the regular checking is important, and will help you track your beans’ progress, especially when you’re new to cooking beans.

Just when the beans reach tenderness, that’s when you add your salt and pepper. No sooner! If you add the salt before the beans are cooked, the bean skins will split open. The goal is to salt them towards the end of cooking. Some people like to wait until the very end of cooking to salt them, but I followed Mark Bittman’s advice and salted them as soon as they were tender. Then I kept them going for another half hour or so, checking on them regularly, until I reached my desired consistency. For this bean dish, you’ll want them pretty soft. But if you were making them for a salad or something you might want to cook them a little less.

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For Spicy Beer-Glazed Black Beans:

Ingredients:

a couple glugs of olive oil

1 onion, chopped

2 Serrano peppers, cored, seeded, and chopped (1, or none, if you’re heat sensitive)

3 cloves of garlic, pressed

1 cup of Guinness or your stout of choice

3 cups of black beans, drained

1 tablespoon of chili powder

1 tablespoon of honey

a few generous grinds of salt and pepper

cheddar cheese, grated

Sauté the onion and Serrano peppers in olive oil on medium heat for about 5 minutes, until the onion is soft. Add the garlic, give it a couple stirs (heating just until it’s fragrant — about a minute), and then add the beer, beans, chili powder, honey, and salt and pepper. Bring it to a steady bubble and cook until the liquid is reduced to your desired thickness. The end result should be wet, but not watery — mine took around 25 minutes. Taste and add salt and pepper accordingly.

I dished the beans out with a slotted spoon (although it had been cooked down so much that this wasn’t really necessary), and then served them with heaps of grated cheddar cheese on top. Creamy, rich, and oh-so-delicious.

Filed under: Beans, Beer, Serrano Peppers   |  1 Comment