Sunday, April 14, 2013

Chili Non Carne

This post appears identically on Cooking with Charles and UMN Cooks 2013.


This recipe comes from Bittman -- page 429. He calls it chili, which seems pretty suspect as it contains no tomatoes.



Start by boiling a pound of dry beans and a whole onion in a pot of water with salt and pepper until they're soft. How long this takes will depend on whether or not you soaked your beans beforehand (and how old the beans are, apparently) but it may be up to two hours. The recipe suggests pinto beans but I just finished off a few nearly-empty jars: kidney beans, black beans, and black eyed peas.



Once the beans are soft, drain them and toss the onion. Then add to the beans one minced onion, 1 tsp cumin, 1/2 tsp oregano, two crushed dried hot chiles, about six cloves of minced garlic, and one cup of broth. As it cooks down, add more stock; I ended up using a total of three cups by the end.



Let this simmer for a while and melt all of the flavors together. I have a thing for beans with rice so I served this over brown rice, but I think Bittman's intention is that you put it in a bowl, maybe with some cornbread.



Now, I feel like this recipe is probably fine. But my beans have been sitting dry for the better part of four years. They were not excited at the prospect of being reconstituted. I boiled them for the better part of three hours, with all of those seasonings. But at the end, really, this whole concoction just tasted like not-quite-done beans.


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