A Southwest Dinner

We're getting close to the summer travel season when we are going to be on the road somewhat often. Before we leave for Virginia for my daughter Ellie's wedding, we wanted to have Rob and Dyce over for a casual dinner.

Rob and Dyce Brought the Most Gorgeous Peonies

I really am trying to avoid dinners with lots of last minute cooking so that I can relax and focus on guests. That shifts meals towards braises and dishes without touchy timing. Ann had kindly suggested all manner of dishes, but nothing grabbed me.

Unclear on what to make and rooting through the freezer, I found a bag of cleaned and cubed pork shoulder from a foray to Costco. Their shoulders come in two packs and that's a ton of meat. I typically break down both shoulders into cubes for braises like carnitas and freeze what I don't need right away.

Knowing that Rob and Dyce are fond of New Mexican food had me thinking along those lines and so I decided to make chile verde. After pondering for a few days, I decided to make a posole casserole to accompany the pork, and to offer empanadas for an appetizer. After a week of beautiful weather, it cooled off again and the choice of heartier food seemed lucky and apropos.

Then I remembered the heirloom masa harina that Ann gave me for my birthday and I decided to make tortillas to accompany the meal. And so the menu was set with the only last minute task to cook the tortillas. Somehow in the course of moving, my tortilla press did not make it to this house and so I improvised using a cast iron pan and a cut open Ziploc bag.

Empanadas de Picadillo Dulce, Cilantro Aïoli

Empanadas I make with an egg-enriched pie crust that never fails to bake up flaky and golden brown especially when brushed with an egg wash. Habitually, I fill empanadas most often with picadillo dulce, a sweet and sour pork that I first learned about by reading old Spanish-language recipes in the Biblioteca Nacional de México.

The filling is clearly of Moorish origin, containing almonds, olives, and sometimes raisins, though I have made it my own through the years. This version was ground pork shoulder, almonds, olives, onion, poblano chile, garlic, Mexican oregano, and three types of dried red chile (the majority ancho). I made it sweet and sour with brown sugar and Sherry vinegar. I have outlined the process in a previous post.

Masa Balls for Tortillas

Ghetto Tortilla Press: My 1930's Griswold Skillet

Tortillas on the Table

Chile Verde, Posole-Chipotle Casserole, Tortillas

Chile verde is not a recipe but an idea. At essence, it is cubes of pork braised in a salsa verde. There are as many ways to make it as there are cooks and they are all wonderful. I am certain that I make it differently each time and this time, I used the slow cooker to free our single oven to use in baking the posole.

For chile verde, there are two essential steps. First, make a salsa verde and second, brown the meat and braise it in the salsa.

For salsa verde, I roasted at high temperature (say 400F) a sheet tray of poblano peppers, Anaheim peppers, onions, garlic, and tomatillos. I rotated the chiles as each side became blistered. Once done, I pulled the tray out and covered it in film so that the veg could steam until cool and loosen the pepper skins.

Next up, I skinned and cleaned the peppers, dicing and reserving three or four Anaheims for the posole casserole. The peppers, garlic, tomatillos, onion, and a bunch of fresh cilantro went into the food processor. I blended it until roughly smooth and put it in the slow cooker.

For the pork, in recent years, I have adopted a process by which I only brown one surface of the cubes. This provides great flavor while not drying out the pork. After browning all the pork and putting it in the food processor, I deglazed the pan with a splash of water and poured all the porky goodness into the slow cooker with the pork and salsa. Eight hours later, the pork was tender and the sauce reduced to just the right thickness.

The posole casserole, something I started making in my 20s as a broke graduate student, I assembled in the afternoon and put into at 350F oven about 90 minutes before we were ready to eat. Timing is not critical, a delightfully brown crust is.

I admit that I did not make my own posole, though I could. I bought two 28-ounce cans of commercial hominy, the same Teasdale brand that I used in the restaurant. One can each of yellow and white hominy went into a mixing bowl with the reserved chopped green chiles, half a bunch of sliced green onions, and the kernels of one ear of fresh sweet corn for contrast and variation on the corn theme. Purple hominy (maíz morado) would have been cool, but my store had none.

I bound the casserole with a chipotle béchamel: olive oil and a spoon of flour cooked for a minute, then a pinch of salt and one finely chopped chipotle in adobo. After mixing the hominy and sauce, I adjusted the salt and put it into an oiled baking dish and topped it with a little grated white cheese. The result is as delicious as it is simple.

Making tortillas with modern masa harina is a trivial process of mixing the corn flour with enough water to make a workable dough. Then you roll it into balls and smash the balls between sheets of plastic (or a cut open Ziploc freezer bag in my case) in a tortilla press (or beneath a cast iron skillet in my case). We restaurant chefs are used to adapting and overcoming: no tortilla press, no problem. I can even patty them by hand, old school.

After peeling the masa circle off the plastic, it goes into a hot, dry frying pan on low to medium heat. Cooking both sides takes less than a minute and if I had a flat-top, I could have cooked them all at once rather than one at a time. Naturally, I could have fired four pans on the stove and cooked four at a time, but no matter. We were all busy yakking while I was pressing and cooking tortillas.

It should be axiomatic that a tortilla is only as good as the masa from which it is made. And if you use shitty Maseca or Masa Brosa, you are going to get a shitty tortilla. My masa is from Masienda and is processed from heirloom corn varieties grown on small farms in Mexico. It is expensive relative to the big brands (but even so, tortillas cost cents), but it helps sustain small farmers and preserve heirloom corn varieties.

José Restaurant, Dallas

We considered several options to get to San Angelo TX to visit with Carter for his 25th birthday. The most efficient proved to be to fly to Dallas, rent a car, and drive the four hours to San Angelo. With a return flight to Oregon at 10am on Monday morning, we decided that we would return to Dallas on Sunday evening and camp out at a hotel near the airport, especially given the inefficiency of the rental car system at DFW.

This schedule left us with the opportunity to have a nice dinner in Dallas on Sunday night, a night when many restaurants are not open. Of all the places we could have gone, we chose José near Love Field in north Dallas, an easy drive from our hotel near DFW. José is known for its elevated Guadalajaran-inflected food and drink, a celebrated female chef in AQ Pittman, its use of house-made masa from corn brought in from Mexico, and a segment on "Taco Chronicles," the Netflix show that you do not dare watch if you are remotely hungry or trying to lose weight.

The Very Handsome Floor-to-Ceiling Back Bar at José

As a chef, when I go to a restaurant, I just want the kitchen team at that restaurant to show me what they do well. The restaurant knows far better than I do what they do well. So, why should I order off the menu if I have the option to let my hosts decide? It's a rare restaurant that will roll with a request to just order for Ann and me (there are some technical POS issues, but that's more a cop out than anything), so when I e-mailed asking if they would just order for us, I was pleasantly surprised to get an affirmative response from GM Victor Rojas within a short while.

Just as we were seated, a runner dropped off a basket of totopos and a couple of salsas, one red and one green. The green salsa was one of the standouts of the night. It was almost identical to the usual salsa verde I make at home, except that it was smoother and less rustic. I really enjoyed it. It's the small things for me that make an experience.

Within a couple of minutes of our being seated, Victor appeared at our table bearing amuses and introduced himself. He would take great care of us personally for most of the evening and we greatly enjoyed chatting with him.

Blue Corn Sopecito with Blue Crab Salad

While we were munching on the tiny sopes and contemplating the cocktail menu, I had a chance to look around the spacious dining room of the building that was once a dry cleaner. The industrial steel clear span framing gives a large open interior and high ceilings that leave room for an immense custom floor-to-ceiling back bar that is the focal point of the room.

Back to the table, the star of the sopecitos was not the crab, but the blue corn masa from which they were made. One of the primary reasons we selected this restaurant is because they nixtamalize their own corn and grind their own masa. Nixtamalization is the process of soaking dried corn kernels in a basic solution that dissolves the hard outer shell, the pericarp, of the kernel.

It is a process that my great grandmothers would have used to make the hominy (posole) so prevalent to the Scots-Irish Appalachians. When I was a boy, I would often see ash hoppers at country auctions. People would fill these hoppers with ashes from the fireplace and the rainwater would filter through the hopper and drain into a bucket below. The solution in the bucket would be lye, potassium hydroxide. Today, rather than using lye, we use refined hydrated lime (calcium hydroxide) called cal to nixtamalize corn.

Victor helped us choose cocktails. I had a riff on a Manhattan called the The José Way Manhattan, a dark complex mixture of mezcal, amaro, Banane du Brésil, vanilla, and Angostura bitters. Ann had a smoked tequila Old Fashioned of reposado, agave, and a couple of bitters. We really enjoyed our cocktails; they are similar to what we are making currently at our home bar where Ann's Oaxacan Old Fashioned will hang with anybody's.

Ann and Her Smoked Tequila Old Fashioned

The José Way Manhattan

Victor also brought us small glasses of the house mezcal and said that he had gone to Mexico to help make it. After smelling its unusual fruity nose similar to an eau de vie or schnapps, I asked how it was made. It is a pechuga of 100% espadín piñas. The pechuga used in the redistillation came from things that he sourced at the market: apples, guavas, and chile chilhaucle. I have had pechugas flavored with all sorts of things, but this was the most unique mezcal that I have ever tasted, a smooth and highly refined spirit that I enjoyed.

Arugula with Peaches, Fresnos, Grilled Okra, and Goat Cheese

Next up was an arugula salad course, the standout of the meal for me. The salad was plated on a spread of goat cheese from fairly local (Waco) Pachi Pachi Farms. The best parts were the fresh salad ingredients: sliced peaches, sliced mildly spicy Fresnos, and the revelatory ingredient, sliced grilled okra. I also loved the crunch of the toasted quinoa sprinkled on the salad.

As a southerner, I have grown, harvested, and cooked okra all my life. Even though I have cooked it myriad ways, I never thought to grill it gently. The smokiness from the grill enhances the small tender okra without activating any of its slime. In the highest form of chef flattery, I may rip this off, if I can ever find some tender baby okra out here in Oregon where it is essentially non-existent. 

Champagne Telmont

Our cocktails were done after the salad, so wanting a wine that would be able to stand up to anything that might come next, we went the sparkling route, ordering a bottle of Champagne Telmont. A label that we have not had before, it was a fine all-purpose wine with lots of red fruit dominating the nose, the palate balanced by a healthy addition of Chardonnay.

Dobladas de Pollo Enmoladas

Our first course with the Champagne was a plate of dobladas covered in mole. I detected chicken thigh meat, poblanos, and a white melting cheese inside the fresh tortillas and the top had a good sprinkle of queso fresco. To be honest, I wasn't expecting mole in a self-styled Jaliscan/Guadalajaran restaurant, but I have never met a mole I did not like.

Victor referred to the mole as "aged mole," meaning that each new batch contains some of the previous batch, old school, the way it has always been and should be done. He regaled us with the story of the line cook who thought to put the final batch of mole before COVID into the freezer to be used as a starter on the far side of the pandemic. Good looking out!

The mole on these dobladas was a fairly dark, fruity, complex sauce that in my world I would call a mole poblano. As much as I loved this mole, I cannot help but wonder how this combination of chicken, poblanos, and cheese would respond to a mole verde or pipián.

The star of this dish was neither the mole nor the filling. To quote Ann, “that tortilla though!” She would have been content with a stack of those tortillas and a ramekin of that excellent salsa verde. As would I.

Carne Asada, "Patatas Bravas," Salsa Roja

The Carne was an Excuse to Snack Fresh Tortillas!

We would get more awesome tortillas with our next dish, a cast iron dish of carne asada, onions, and peppers, served with whole roasted potatoes tossed in spice ("patatas bravas"), and a beautiful salsa roja. The eye opener from this dish was the salsa roja, an intense concentrated tomato sauce. The sauce was enhanced with smoky chile morita. The texture of the sauce and the smokiness reminded me in the best way of a beautiful roasted eggplant sauce.

Again, while the meat was awesome (sous vide tenderloin, I think), the tortillas and the salsa roja stole the thunder. Ann and I asked for more tortillas with which we polished off all that delicious sauce.

Coconut Flan with Candied Amaranth and Pepita Topping

Neither Ann nor I are dessert eaters because sweet flavors are not really our thing. Flan is so often cloying and pedestrian, but not so in this case. The pastry chef had a deft hand with the sugar and the addition of coconut milk made this flan much more interesting than usual. 

After dinner, Victor brought us little glasses of dark, barely sweet Fernet-Vallet as a digestif, a nice parting gesture. We thanked him profusely for his hospitality, the willingness to order for us, the excellent staff training, and of course, a delicious meal for which I would like to thank all the BoH team, especially the prep cooks and dishwashers who never get any credit, but without whom, nothing would happen.

The stand-out components of our meal were none of the star players. The glory goes to the supporting actors: the masa, the grilled okra, the salsa verde, and the salsa roja.

I compliment Victor, a consummate hospitality professional, and the service team on their attentiveness. I always love going to a restaurant where the entire service team takes responsibility for all guests, not the usual "not my table, not my problem" attitude. The FoH staff at José are well trained. Not a lot of guests would notice this, but then, I'm not an average guest, having owned, cooked at, and run a fine dining restaurant for a very long time.

Black-Eyed Pea and Corn Filé Gumbo

I have always loved black-eyed peas. Not only are they part and parcel of my Southern heritage, but they are also delicious, easy to grow, and easy to shell. 

Black-Eyed Pea and Corn Filé Gumbo

Black-eyed peas are very different from beans even though the two are used in the same ways; they belong to two different botanical families. While beans are decidedly New World, field peas such as black-eyed peas come from the Old World, West Africa to be precise. All the types of field peas are lumped into the term cowpea (from their heritage as animal fodder).

I have eaten all manner of cowpeas under many names and in many colors and shapes, such as crowder peas, Sea Island red peas, black-eyed peas, cream peas, lady peas, and pink eye peas. Culinarily, they are interchangeable and for my taste, the fresh green versions are better than the dried versions. At least, they are very different in flavor profile. A green black-eyed pea will be very mild and quick cooking; dried black-eyes are deep and rich in flavor and need long cooking.

It being just after the first of the year, black-eyed peas have been on my mind. For us Southerners, a batch of black-eyed peas are required dining to bring good luck for the forthcoming year. For various reasons, I did not make my usual New Years' black-eyed peas, so I wanted to rectify that.

As I was walking the grocery store recently, the idea of a black-eyed pea and corn gumbo sprang into my mind unbidden and I stopped by the freezer aisle to score a couple bags of frozen green black-eyed peas and frozen sweet corn kernels. Both of these vegetables freeze well and are among the only frozen vegetables that I use (the odd bag of  pearl onions aside).

Last night was an opportune moment to make said gumbo and so I started as I do all my gumbos by making a roux. Not wanting to set off the smoke detectors in the house, I kept my roux to medium brown, about two-thirds of the way to being a black roux.

A gumbo roux is one part each of fat and flour, heated while stirring, until the flour browns to the shade that you require. The rule of thumb is that the lighter the protein (chicken, seafood) the darker the roux and the darker the meat (venison, pork) the lighter the roux. Back in 2008, I did a pictorial on making roux, if you want to see the process in action.

The next step in making a gumbo for me is to add the trinity (mirepoix, the Cajun holy trinity: onions, peppers, and celery) to the roux which stops the roux from browning further and starts to cook the vegetables. I used one and a half poblano peppers, two stalks of celery, one really large onion, one half a bunch of green onions, and about six cloves of garlic, minced.

After stirring the vegetables in, I added about a quarter cup of my home-grown Cajun spice mix and let it cook briefly before adding a quart of water. If I had a good vegetable stock, I would have used that instead of water. I turned the heat down and left the stew base to simmer for a half an hour at which point, I added two bags of frozen black-eyed peas and let them cook until they were tender, about twenty minutes. After the gumbo cooks for a while, the oil that you used in the roux will gather on top and you can ladle it away.

To finish the gumbo, I added the corn and then I seasoned and thickened it. In terms of thickening gumbo, there are two methods, one from African slaves and one from indigenous tribes. Now would be a good time to mention that gumbo derived from the Angolan word kingombo, meaning okra, The first means of thickening is to add sliced okra to the stew and let it cook in well. The okra will largely disintegrate and all its (frankly, nasty) mucilaginous interior will thicken the stew.

The second method, from the Choctaw tribes native to the Gulf South, is to stir in filé powder, ground sassafras leaves. Sassafras is a small shrub/tree native to the southeast, a shrub whose roots and bark make a nice tea and whose leaves lend a spicy herbal note to dishes, reminiscent to me in some ways of thyme.

I am not the world's biggest okra fan, having had to eat way too much of it as a child and worse, having had to pick it daily as a child. Cutting okra is an unpleasant experience. It grows in hot humid places such as Alabama where I spent my teenage years. And the head-high plants are horribly irritating to your exposed skin, especially when exacerbated by the inevitable sweat born of such a climate.

Although I could have bought sliced and frozen okra at the grocery store, where it is neatly stacked alongside the black-eyed peas, my aversion to it leads me to thicken my gumbos with filé powder whose flavor I prefer. My mother mostly used okra (duh, they had a freaking garden full of it) and sometimes she committed the culinary faux pas of using both okra and filé powder simultaneously, something that could result in your excommunication from the Southern fraternity in certain areas.

I will say that I do love fried okra, just not the boiled crap that my mother insisted I eat or go hungry. Going hungry was very tempting, I must say.

At the last moment, I stirred in a good bit of salt, filé powder, and the frozen corn. I turned off the heat and let the gumbo stand for five minutes to let the corn warm through. Sweet corn kernels need no cooking at all. And there you have it, a quick gumbo of black-eyed peas and corn.

Kitchen Basics: Poaching Shrimp

It's summer now, even in Bend, Oregon where it last snowed on June 19th of this year, and our palates are turning towards cooler dishes and to raw ingredients. Last night, after waiting nearly a week for our avocados to ripen, I made a quick salad of fresh tomatoes, raw corn, diced avocados, and poached shrimp. I imagine this salad has been made millions of times; there's nothing special about it save for perhaps how I poach my shrimp.

Tomato, Corn, and Avocado Salad with Poached Shrimp

This is a perfect dish to illustrate poaching seafood using a court bouillon, a classic flavored and acidulated poaching liquid, one of the foundations of French seafood cookery.

Although I have specified a recipe below, at the end of the day, we're talking about a salad and salads are nothing if not fungible. That is, you should feel free to adjust this any way that you want. Want a higher proportion of tomatoes? Add them. Don't like cilantro? Maybe use Italian parsley. Don't have a red onion in the pantry? Use green ones instead. Want to add toasted macadamia nuts? Do it. Hopefully, you get the idea.

Tomato, Corn, and Avocado Salad with Poached Shrimp

1 dry pint of small salad tomatoes, halved or quartered depending on size
3 ears of sweet corn, kernels shaved off
4 medium or 2 large avocadoes, diced
1/4 of a medium red onion diced, about a 1/2 a cup
1/2 cup of cilantro leaves
1 pound of poached and cooled medium peeled shrimp
juice of one large lime
2 tablespoons salad oil (I used extra virgin)
salt to taste

Mix all ingredients. Taste and adjust seasoning. Serve immediately so that avocados do not brown. Serves two amply as a main course or four to six people for an appetizer. This would also make a great filling for lettuce wraps.

Poaching Shrimp in Court Bouillon

I call for a sachet for the spices in the court bouillon so that you don't have to pick the spices out of the shrimp before you use them in your salad. You are, of course, welcome to pick them out but don't blame me if you get grumpy about it.

2 quarts of water
1/4 cup of rice vinegar
2 tablespoons Kosher salt
1/2 teaspoon black pepper
1 cheesecloth sachet containing:

1 clove garlic, sliced

1 teaspoon coriander seeds

1 teaspoon allspice berries

1/2 teaspoon brown or yellow mustard seeds

pinch crushed red pepper flakes

Bring all the ingredients to a slight boil and let them cook for 5-10 minutes to really flavor the court bouillon. Raise the heat to a rolling boil and add the shrimp. When the court bouillon comes back to the boil, turn off the heat and walk away. After 15 minutes or so, the shrimp will be cooked and more importantly, will have picked up a bit of the flavorings.

You can use the shrimp warm, allow them to cool in the broth to room temperature, or drain them and refrigerate for later use cold. Me, I like to cool them to room temperature in the court bouillon and add to the other room temperature ingredients in my salad.

Cold Dish for a Hot Day

Ahi Tataki on Salad of Sugar Snaps, Tomatoes, and Corn

What to eat on a very hot day? Something cold and fresh. This salad really hit the spot and represents everything I have learned as a chef about simplicity and letting ingredients shine.

I knew I hit the mark when Ann asked the question on eating the salad, "What did you do to this?" I replied "Nothing." When you have ingredients this fresh and high quality, you don't have to do a thing. Learning this lesson has taken decades.

A new trick for an old chef. I have learned (perhaps re-learned) this summer that if you put a quick blister on sugar snaps, you can coax the peas into a deliciousness that tops even their totally raw state. Very many sugar snaps have never even made it home this spring from the farmers market, having been snacked by Ann and me on the walk home. That's how delicious they are totally raw.

To make them even better, I heat a pan over blazing heat, generally on the grill outside. Just as I'm ready to cook, a touch of oil (in this case, sesame) goes into the pan, and then the peas go in to sit for a few seconds to char the pods a bit, and then are tossed with a sprinkle of salt until the pods go from raw green to bright green all over, a minute or so. The result is still nearly raw (certainly the peas inside the pods remain raw) and beguilingly delicious.

The salad in the photo above adds halved small tomatoes and raw shaved corn. On top of this are slices of tuna that I seared in the cast iron pan after the peas came out. A sprinkle of really good salt finishes the dish. Sublime.

Cinco de Mayo

Time to celebrate! Ann and I are now three weeks or so past our COVID booster shots and we feel relatively safe to socialize in small groups outdoors with others who have also been vaccinated. To better get to know our neighbors, from whom we've been at a considerable distance over the last year, we're embarking on a series of porch parties, the first of which we held on Cinco de Mayo.

Unlike a lot of previous affairs, we kept this one really simple and now that we're retired, simple will be the model going forward. I made refried black beans with salsa fresca as a chip dip and a large bowl of rajas con crema, creamed strips of poblano chiles with corn, for tacos. Liz brought a platter of pork quesadillas and Sandy brought a black bean salad. Annie made tequila-lime cupcakes for dessert.

Annie was in charge of décor, arranging everything just so and picking some flowers for the bar. Libation-wise, I made a batch of margaritas and put cheap Mexican beer and white wine on ice. Easy.

After everyone left, Ann and I cleaned up from dinner (disposable plates and cups, not very Oregon eco-blahblah, but easy) and then went back outside on the patio to enjoy the first really beautiful night of the year.

This was the most normal we have felt in a very, very long time. What a relief! Maybe the light at the end of the COVID tunnel is not a train after all.

Chipotle Chicken with Grilled Vegetable Salad

We had a bunch of things in the refrigerator that needed to be eaten and so I set about turning them into a delicious meal. I really succeeded with this grilled dinner of chicken and vegetables. The aim was to keep the fat to a minimum, so I deboned and skinned the chicken thighs. And the grilled vegetables were so tasty on their own that they needed no dressing. The only fat was a touch of pan spray on the vegetables to promote their charring.

Chipotle Chicken with Grilled Vegetable Salad

Chicken Thighs in Chipotle-Lime-Agave Marinade

When I buy chicken thighs, I buy an entire tray of 8 of them. After boning them out, I use the bones and skin to make chicken stock for the refrigerator. I'm always using chicken stock for all kinds of things, at least a quart a week.

These thighs went into a seal-top bag with a chipotle marinade and into the refrigerator for a few hours before grilling. To make the marinade, I blended three chipotles, a tablespoon of chipotle adobo, the juice of one lime, and three tablespoons of agave syrup.

Salad Vegetables, Ready to Cook

For vegetables for the salad, I scavenged the refrigerator and came up with a zucchini, two ears of corn, a big handful of green beans, and five nice Padrón peppers. Add to this a big onion from the pantry. My intent was to grill everything, chop it, and mix it with chipotle-roasted garlic salsa.

Vegetables on the Grill

Once the grill got blazing hot, I started by grilling the vegetables and getting them really charred. Charring gives them great flavor. After the vegetables came off, I put on the chicken. While the chicken was cooking, I assembled the grilled vegetable salad by chopping all the vegetables and slicing the charred corn kernels off the cobs. I mixed the grilled vegetables with a diced tomato and that was it.

With just a touch of salt, the mixed vegetables were so tasty on their own that I scrapped the idea of dressing them with anything. The salad was as delicious as it was beautiful.

Chipotle-Lime-Agave Chicken Grilling

For twenty minutes of prep time, we thoroughly enjoyed a delicious summer dinner that did not heat up the kitchen at all, a great return on my minimal investment of time. This was the first time that I have ever grilled green beans, believe it or not. We love to roast pans of haricots filets; they're a favorite snack, so I knew that grilling green beans would be delicious. Top top it off, a quart and a half of fresh chicken stock in the refrigerator was bonus!

Frijoles Peruanos

I've cooked many different kinds of beans in my life beyond the five commonly found in the grocery store. These include such wonderful heirloom beans as bird egg, cranberry, tarbais, Jacob's cattle, and Stueben yellow eye. But I've never had the opportunity to work with frijoles peruanos before. They're also known as frijoles canarios, canary beans, or mayocoba beans. 

As luck would have it, I was in a local store that sells overstock and surplus goods and they had a bunch of peruanos for sale. I bought three kilos clearly packed and labeled for the Mexican market. "Beans" is the only word in English on the entire package.

A Kilo of Frijoles Peruanos

They are a medium-sized bean (where navy beans are small and scarlet runners are large) that appear tan or yellow, hence the "canary" name, I suppose. I had read that they are similar in many respects to cannellini beans and after having cooked them, I can attest that they really resemble cannellini, the most versatile of all the beans that I have cooked.

When faced with a new bean, I like to do two things with them to check them out. First, I like to cook them as pot beans (frijoles de la olla) and then recook them as refritos, refried beans. The first tells me a lot about how they hold their shape and what their basic flavor is. The second tells me how creamy the bean is.

Pot Beans, Frijoles de la Olla, Starting to Cook

After the peruanos soaked overnight in three or four changes of water, I started them in a big pot. I'm afraid I don't have an earthenware olla in which they are traditionally cooked. A lot of people, when cooking frijoles de la olla, merely cook the beans with a little onion, garlic, and a sprig or two of epazote. 

I've tried epazote over and over and I just can't become acclimated to its medicinal, creosote-like flavor. So I don't use it. Moreover, I knew that I wanted use my beans for frijoles charros after they cooked, so I jumped the gun a bit and cooked these beans with onion, poblano, garlic, tomatoes, and cilantro stems, rather than just plain with onion or plain with onion and beer (frijoles borrachos, drunken beans).

The beans hold their shape really well and they seem like a versatile general purpose bean. I can see why they are a favorite bean in Jalisco.

Frijoles a la Charra

After the beans became tender, I made a pound of chorizo (Numex chile, cumin, Mexican oregano, garlic, black pepper, salt, and red wine vinegar) and fried that up a bit. Then I added several ladles of beans and their broth to the chorizo. After cooking for twenty minutes or so to meld all the flavors, we gobbled up bowls of these soupy beans, topped with a touch of cotija and cilantro.

Most versions of these beans, named after the ranchers and cowboys of the north of Mexico, include bacon, ham, and/or other meats. I didn't want to go whole hog with this batch, preferring to emphasize the beans over the meat. While they constituted the entirety of our dinner, they are usually a side dish to the carne asada at grill fests all over the north of Mexico.

This style of beans is often called cowboy beans in English after the charros, but I prefer to call them a la charra after the cowboy's wife, because who do we really think was cooking the beans while the cowboys were out doing cowboy stuff?

Enfrijoladas de Pollo

Because a kilo of beans is a lot of beans for two people, there were plenty of leftover pot beans to play with. The next thing I wanted to do was get a sense for how creamy the beans were. I decided to make a great Mexican dish that you encounter rarely north of the border: enfrijoladas. Think enchiladas using a bean sauce rather than a chile sauce. I outline how to make enfrijoladas in a separate post.

Antique Bean Masher

The verdict after scarfing the enfrijoladas is that frijoles peruanos make great refritos. For making refritos, even though I have a beautiful old antique bean masher that I've used a lot, I'm spoiled by my big Vitamix blender. The photo above is of a heavy hand-carved maple masher that feels great in my hand, but takes a lot of effort and time for making big batches of refried beans.

Frijoles Refritos

To make refritos, I give the pot beans and plenty of their cooking liquid a quick whir in the blender. Then they go into a hot pan containing lard, or in this case, bacon grease leftover from cooking bacon for BLTs the day before. Sometimes I add finely minced onion to my refritos, but not this time. The beans in the photo above are starting to hold their shape when the spatula moves through them, but they still contain too much liquid. When done, the beans will start to pull away from the edge of the pan.

Tostadas/Garnaches

After a couple of lunches of plain beans, I made refritos from the remaining beans, smeared them on tostadas, and topped them with fresh tomato, fresh raw sweet corn, and a touch of cotija. Here in the states, we know tostadas pretty well. In countries other than Mexico such as Guatemala and Belize, tostadas topped with refried beans are known as garnaches, though they're slightly different than what you see above.

Here's a tip for you. I don't buy overpriced tostadas at the store. I also don't fry mine. I sandwich fresh corn tortillas 8 at a time between two half sheet trays and bake them at 350F until they are crisp. Sandwiching them between the two sheet trays keeps them relatively flat.

So ends the tale of this kilo of frijoles peruanos. By whatever name, they're a wonderfully versatile bean that I wish I had the opportunity to try much earlier in my life.