The Fugue

So we got a pressure cooker, as an advance Christmas present. See, we had all these turkey bones to turn into stock and babysitting a simmering pot over 8 hours didn’t seem like very much fun. When I realized you can get a good but basic pressure cooker for $30, the rest was history.

I made stock yesterday. I cooked it for an hour, and it seems like decent stock though I don’t have a PhD in stock discrimination. The bones didn’t break easily like AB says they should, so next time I’ll try 2 hours (we do have more turkey bones—they didn’t all fit in one batch).

Then, I turned my attention to beans for dinner. See, beans are a bit of a dilemna in our house. Erin loves them in almost any guise, but I am quite a bit more picky. I do like them when they are done right, but when they are not the right texture or taste too bland I turn my nose up. Of course the obvious things to do to make me like them are add plenty of salt and fat and cook them until they’re one step from refried. Unfortunately this goes against every fiber of my wife’s being, so we have a kind of standoff compromise: she makes beans the way she likes them (healthy and bland) and I eat them without complaining too much.

Armed with the new toy, I set out to rectify the situation. There were two obstacles: texture and taste. I won’t bore you with the details of my research, I’ll just tell you there are several old wives tales about beans and what I think I have learned to be the truth.

First, they say you should soak them. I believe this is true, but not for the reasons “they” say. I have seen enough anecdotal evidence online to indicate that you don’t need to soak them to get good texture, and that the time savings in the cooking isn’t very much. However, this article makes a good nutritional case for soaking. In short, the soak makes the nutrients in the beans more accessible to your body. So I did a quick soak (boil for 3 minutes, let sit for an hour or two).

Second, they say you shouldn’t add salt. This appears to be largely untrue, with perhaps a grain of truth. Google “salt beans mcgee” for more details. So to my 1 lb soaked black beans I added 1 tablespoon salt. Based on McGee’s information I will try adding the salt to the soak water instead in the future. They also say you shouldn’t add acid. I didn’t want chili, so that didn’t apply.

The pressure cooker manual says to add a tablespoon or two of oil or lard to keep the foaming down and prevent clogging of the pressure cooker vent (that’s a Bad Thing™). Lard is definitely the premier choice here. I guess you could add bacon instead if you have a lard aversion.

Somewhere I read the suggestion to cook beans in stock for more flavor. Hey, I had a bunch of turkey stock, why not? So I omitted the lard (I hadn’t skimmed any fat yet since the stock hadn’t cooled).

1 lb dry black beans, soaked
poultry stock to cover by about 1 inch
1 tablespoon salt

pressure cook 12 minutes then remove from heat and allow pressure to release naturally (about 30 minutes).

At this point I added some chopped onion and garlic and simmered while the rice cooked. Oh, speaking of rice, for excellent latino white rice just sweat some onion and/or garlic and salt, then add the rice and sautee until the rice changes color, then add the water, bring to a boil, cover and cook over low heat about 20 minutes.

There you go. Beans and rice in 2 hours with leftovers to last you all week. The beans were dramatically unbroken yet soft and not the least bit crunchy anywhere. The taste was fine, though not unhealthy or overly salty. The weak point this time was actually the rice (I wasn’t careful enough and ended up with unbalanced flavor and too little rice to match the beans so we didn’t have equal parts leftovers).

You haven’t lived until you’ve had Brazilian cuisine, and feijoada is as Brazilian as it gets. (Personally, churrasco beats the pants off feijoada any day, but churrasco is in a class all its own.)

I finally got up the courage this weekend to make feijoada, even though I had no Brazilians to guide me except ye olde internet. I’m happy to report the experiment was a success. It was delicious, and probably not entirely unlike authentic feijoada (it has been over 9 or 10 years since I had some, not counting Tucanos).

The trouble with trying to make feijoada from the cookbook of Google is that the dish is at once both incredibly simple and incredibly complex and varied. It’s simple in that it’s essentially just beans and pork. It’s complex and varied in that most recipes call for a half dozen kinds of pork, make huge amounts, and generally contradict each other.

The recipe I ended up using as a basis was from Maria’s Cookbook. It’s a veritable gold mine of Brazilian recipes.

So, let’s get down to my experiment. I went to Albertson’s and grabbed one 1-lb bag of black beans, 1 package (about 1 lb) of salt pork, and 1 kielbasa sausage (about 1 lb). For some reason my wife didn’t let me get pig’s feet, but that would have been fairly traditional. I also picked up some yuca, since farofa was nowhere to be found. Oh, and I grabbed some kale.

Saturday night I started the beans soaking, then realized the timing might be a little off. I read somewhere that you don’t want to soak more than about 12 hours, but we were to be at church from 12–4. So I began contemplating slow cookage.

The next morning, into the crock pot on high. I sautéed about half the onion and 2 small cloves garlic in a bit of olive oil, and threw that in too. Then some 3 hours or so later I chopped up the salt pork and kielbasa and put it in as well, and a couple pinches of kosher salt (I think I had to add a touch of water at this point too).

After church, the beans were still not quite done, but the meat definitely was. However, the salt pork was still a lot of solid fat. I think next time I would render the fat before putting it in, and since it was so fatty I’d probably just use bacon or pork butt next time (or pig’s feet if I could get away with it). It was also a tad too salty, so if I were using salt pork or something equally salty in its place, I’d skip the pinches of kosher salt.

While it continued cooking I boiled the yuca and made the rice. When the yuca was fork-tender, I drained, dried, and cut into strips. Then I fried it. It was disgusting, I think because it was probably really old. I wonder if you can order farofa online…

About 5:30 or 6 the beans were nice and tender, so I chopped up the kale and just barely wilted it in butter (per this recipe for couve a mineira, though it was kale instead of collard greens). Then dinner was served to salivating family.

The long cook had made the meat bloated and a bit too soft, and though most of the salt pork fat was melted in the end I still wished I had rendered it or used something else. The kale garnish was delicious and contributed as much as anything to the authenticity. We threw the yuca away.

So here’s the recipe I’ll try next time:

Feijoada

1 lb black beans
1 lb bacon, pork butt, ham hock, pigs feet, salt pork, or any other pork
1 lb kielbasa sausage
1/4 of a medium onion
1 clove garlic

Soak beans, bring to a boil and simmer one hour. Sauté garlic and onion in
olive oil, render fat out of garlic or salt pork as needed, and add to the
beans. Continue to simmer about another half hour, add salt to taste, and
simmer until beans are tender. Mash some beans to thicken. Serve over rice
and garnish with greens and farofa.

I’m making two assumptions here that need bearing out: it really does take about 2.5–3 hours to cook soaked black beans, and that the meat will cook thoroughly in the 1–1.5 hours time. I think the latter assumption is fairly safe, but I’m not sure about the former. Why don’t you give it a try and let me know?

Redbeard’s post about Beans and
Rice used leftover
cooked rice, but it got me thinking that I could blog about how the Latin
Americans cook their rice. My information comes from little old abuelitas that
were kind enough to show me how they cooked things, and a Brazilian missionary
roommate.

Latinos cook rice differently than most Americans. I’m not talking about that
“spanish rice” stuff that the Mexicans make. I’m talking plain white rice
which prevails in every other Latin American country. The islanders also have
this yellow stuff which is pretty good, but that’s another show.

There are many variations, as is always the case with rice, but it seems to me
that the basics are simple enough. First, sweat some garlic, onions, and salt.
To be really cool, smash the garlic in a mortar and pestle using the salt as an
abrasive agent. Or you can be lazy and use a garlic press. You’ll have to come
to terms with how much garlic and onion to use, but for a standard saucepan
worth try a clove and half a small yellow onion. As for salt, your instincts
probably tell you to use too little. Don’t skimp – garlic and onion without
salt is not good eats.

Second, put the rice in and stir occasionally (or constantly if you’re the
nervous type). Do this for awhile, until you see most of the rice change. I
don’t remember if it gets translucent or more opaque or what, but you’ll notice
the change.

Third, add water. Americans would add two parts water, but the Latinos added
one part or one and a half parts. I think most that added one part would add
some in the middle, so you might as well go with 1.5. If you’re a coward, go
ahead and put two parts in, but you’ll miss out on the pegado.

Bring to a boil and if necessary let it boil down to where there’s just half an
inch or so of water above the rice. This of course depends on the size and
shape of your vessel, but it’s a good rule of thumb. Now, cover loosely and
reduce heat. But don’t reduce it to almost nothing like we Americans do. We’re
not simply steaming the rice here, we’re also cooking it.

Let the rice cook, checking when you think it might be done. Depending on how
hot and how much water you had you may have to add a little, that’s ok. When
it’s done, it’s ready to eat with black beans or whatever.

The end result is some of the most delicious rice you’ve ever tasted, and if
you’re lucky there will be rice stuck to the bottom and/or sides of the pan.
This is the pegado, and it’s delicious (if you didn’t burn it). If you’ve
never had this, befriend a latino that isn’t from Mexico and stop in for
dinner. You probably won’t get it right the first time, but if you know what
it’s supposed to taste like you can probably use the scientific method to
bridge the gap. A few rules of thumb: don’t skimp on the oil or the salt, and
be sure to fry the rice long enough.

¡Buena Suerte!