Black Bean Cakes

You can call them black bean burgers all you want, but I reserve the word burger for meat, so black bean cakes they are in the vernacular of Ed. For some reason that remains unclear to me, we ended up having black bean cakes for dinner last evening. I know that I volunteered to make them, but why? Ann says it was because we saw some on TV the night before that looked good. Long story short, we dined on black bean cakes last evening. And they were delicious!

Did I mention that we love beans and that black beans are among Ann's most favorite? I love them all and Steuben Yellow Eyes most of all. Someday soon I will post about them; we have a date with them on the 12th of February for our Valentine's dinner. Stay tuned.

Last evening saw a couple of firsts for us: first meal that Ann has really wanted to eat since her surgery (and that is a very, very good thing) and first time that I have ever used a residential food processor (no, no, no bueno). Go ahead, call me spoiled, but I still love my big commercial machine.

And I found out the answer to the age-old question "How many 4.25-ounce black bean cakes can you get out of a #10 can of beans?" The answer friends is 26, or 13 servings.

Making black bean cakes is as simple as cooking up a sofrito (2 diced poblanos, 2 diced onions, 3 tablespoons ground cumin, 1 tablespoon pimentón, 1/2 cup minced garlic, 1/2 cup minced cilantro stems, salt and pepper) and mixing the cooked sofrito with a #10 can (6.5 pounds) of partially blitzed beans, 2 cups panko, and 4 eggs, then forming them into cakes. Refrigerate the cakes a while to firm them up, press them lightly into panko, fry them, then transfer to a hot oven for 3-4 minutes to warm through.

If you're going to the effort, you might as well make a big batch as I did. Black bean cakes freeze well.