Matthias' Bean History and Recipes

It's time for our first guest author: Matthias from mmwhitney.blogspot.com. Matthias is an optical engineer, and he has a great wife (who I owe my PhotoShopEditor skills to, THANKS MEGAN!). In this post, Matthias delves into the wonderful world of Beans. His bean experience follows, along with his recipes for some Yummy Beans. I've compiled his recipes at the end of the post. Enjoy.

I bought a big five pound bag of beans once at Costco, and it was great fun. However, I soon learned that five pounds of beans is ALOT. I did the initial boiling in our big pot (about 2 gallons) but then I soon realized that I would have to split the beans between the 2 gal pot and the crock pot, our only large cooking pot type thing. I also added a little bit of oil with the initial boil.

I'm not sure if that was from a recipe I found or if it was ingenious thinking on my part, but it led to a boil over with my super full two gallon pot which subsequently led to my stove catching on fire! Yikes! But still fun! I ended up making a pork and beans type thing by adding ketchup, BBQ sauce, brown sugar, onions, hot sauce, and other things (I don't often follow recipes to the T). Also, I used leftover boneless country style pork ribs as the "pork" in my pork and beans.

My most recent bean experiments have been a little bit more controlled, with only cooking about a pound of beans at a time. I roughly followed a recipe from Cook's Country magazine for Smokey BBQ Beans, only I didn't follow the smokey instructions. The recipe strictly calls for:

4 slices of bacon
1 onion
4 garlic cloves
(put these ingredients in pot together to simmer flavors, then add:)

1 pound of pintos, soaked overnight
6 cups of water
(simmer until soft, then add:)

1 cup of bbq sauce
1/3 cup packed brown sugar
2 tablespoon mustard
1 teaspoon hot sauce

The final step is to put them in an aluminum pan with foil over the top and set them on open coals with a grill full of meat over the top (see crude drawing 1), but I didn't do this step.

Crude Drawing 1


Also, instead of bacon, I used leftovers from a Christmas ham which was a delicious use of our resources. Also we cook with dehydrated onions and garlic for ease, so really, I just boiled the first stuff with the beans for three+ hours until they were tender (I didn't soak overnight) and then added the other good stuff and simmered them until they were the desired consistency. The outcome was a success and even the wife liked them!

My second experiment with beans was refried beans (total misnomer, not only not doubly fried, but not even fried in the first place!). I boiled the beans for several hours until soft (with some onions and garlic for fun), then put them in the blender to "refry" aka smoosh them. I'm told a potato masher works well too, but I don't own one. I had to blender the beans in shifts so that I didn't overfill my blender and make unnecessary mess, but this required clever coordination of more than one pot. Care should taken to add enough water with the beans in the blender and to not over blenderize, unless you want a refried bean smoothie.

From here, I put the bean goo back in the pot with grated cheese, hot sauce, and salt (I added everything to taste) and simmered it until they were the right consistency. Super easy! And we had bean and cheese burritos for the next few weeks as quick meals and snacks. With just the wife and I, we can't eat a whole pound of beans at once, so we freeze them in cool whip containers and they thaw just fine.

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RECAP:


Smokey BBQ Beans, Matthias Style
[Editor's Note: The flavor of these beans is AMAZINGLY GOOD! If you like your beans mushy (as opposed to somewhat firm), then boil just the beans and water, then let the beans soak for an hour. Then cook them for 3+ hours in a slow cooker, adding the seasonings to the slow cooker.]
In a large pot add:
Meat (ham or bacon, equivalentish to 4 slices of bacon)
Dehydrated onion and garlic (equivalentish to 1 onion and 4 garlic cloves)
1 lb.pinto beans
6 c. water

Boil those ingredients for 3ish hours.

Add 1c bbq sauce, 1/3 c. brown sugar, 2 T mustard, 1 t. hot sauce
Simmer until beans are desired consistency.



Refried Beans, Misnomer Style
Boil 1lb of beans, onions and garlic (in water) for several hours (until beans are soft)
Put the beans in a blender to "refry" them. NOTE: add water as needed AND don't over blend.

Mix the now blended, I mean, Refried, beans with cheese, hot sauce and salt in a pot and simmer until they are the right consistency.



BEAN STORAGE TIP:
store extra (cooked) beans in the freezer until needed.

Wheat "Bread"

Let's get one thing settled before you launch into this post: I am a bread-making novice. Bread has many non-simple things about it. Yeast. Kneading. Waiting. Rising. Kneading....anything that takes that much work just isn't worth it to me. Hence my unrequited love for cinnamon rolls.

So. I ventured into the world of homemade wheat bread with some trepidation and a lot less of the This-is-a-Fun-Experiment attitude I had with beans. Because I know bread. I have a history with bread. Not a good one. Hence my very limited attempts to make it. (sort of counter intuitive isn't it? I didn't stop playing the violin because I really stunk the first year I played it, now did I?) Also, the Fun-Experiment attitude goes awry when I'm making food that's built into my menu for the day because if the food doesn't turn out, then What Will We Eat???? e.g. when I went against common sense and added a WHOLE tablespoon of paprika to a "Hawaiian pork sauce" this week. As attorneys tell juries ad nauseum, "Don't leave your common sense at the courtroom door.")

Bread.
This is attempt No. 1:


Har har. I know. So. The way you will know this is what your bread will look like is that after 5 hours of "rising" it will look like this:

which is exactly what it looked like when you first mixed the dough.

How I salvaged it:

Add some tomato sauce, cheese, meat, and still more cheese. The pizzas tasted pretty good.


Attempt No. 2:


Yum. Made with molasses. And this time, the lack of height is partly my own fault--I started the bread late in the day and wanted it cooked before I went to bed--and partly how the bread should look (I think).

The recipe I used is from the Fannie Farmer Cookbook 13th Ed.
called Entire Wheat Bread. It made a moist, tasty bread, and my husband (who doesn't approve of wheat bread usually) voted it was a keeper. I froze what we couldn't eat (two loaves of hearty bread is more than we can handle in a week). I loved how healthy the bread is. I think my body was thanking me for eating something nutritious for once.

So, the challenge for this week it to get out there and try a bread recipe--and send me pictures of your results and any recipes that were particularly successful (and if you are into copyrights, let me know if I can legitimately post the recipe I used).

Next post will be about wheat grinders (which are a must if you plan on using the wheat you are storing). AND THEN! We have a guest author about beans. I want the post to look good, so it's taking a little more time than I hoped, but it's coming. Hold your breath. So much goodness coming up!