Bean and Legume

Refritos—refried beans—are one of the most common side dishes in Mexican and Southwestern restaurants. Finding a good rendition, though, is rare. Most places use flavorless canned beans for a base—already a poor start. And they don’t take the time to slowly cook and stir them to infuse the mixture with flavor and texture. The best refritos are made from beans cooked from scratch with many different seasonings so the beans absorb the flavors and the cooking liquid is intense and balanced. Here are two recipes for refritos. The first is for black beans cooked from a dried state, which takes several hours to prepare. The second requires just forty minutes and uses canned black beans that are already cooked as a base.

If you don’t have time to cook your beans for refritos, for a better base, buy a Mexican brand of canned black beans like La Casteño, which have more flavor, or the Ranch brand, which have been cooked with jalapeños.

Here is another great side dish for tacos. The beans have a smoky taste from the bacon and smoked salt that makes them a particularly good match for meaty, northern-style dishes featuring beef, lamb, or pork. These pintos are spicier than black beans because of the jalapeños, and you don’t need to cook them as long—just until they are soft. Serve them in bowls with their juices—a perfect addition to any barbecue menu. They’re also hearty enough to be served alone as a meal.

The word charro refers to the original cowboys of the New World, the Mexican and Spanish men who handled the cattle on the large ranches of Mexico and California, and then Texas and the Southwest. The entire cow culture—the hats, saddles, ropes, boots—was brought here by Spanish explorers and settlers. These men lived a nomadic life that revolved around the search for the best seasonal pastures for their herds. Meals were always prepared over open campfires, giving food a smokiness that is forever associated with cowboy cooking. Beans were a common side dish, and the smoked salt in this recipe helps to replicate those robust and smoky flavors. The beans will hold for one week in the refrigerator, and their versatility makes them handy to have around.

This recipe is for borlotti beans flavored with pancetta and sage, but you can apply the technique to most of the beans on page 397, except for lentils and split peas, neither of which need to be presoaked. (See opposite for a basic lentil recipe, and page 401 for split pea soup.) The cooking time depends on the variety and age of bean, so check the consistency often as they cook. The sage and pancetta used below would also work well for white beans, but omit them if making other types of beans, or substitute with other fresh herbs or meats (such as ham hocks or slab bacon). To serve, finish the beans with extra-virgin olive oil, freshly squeezed lemon juice, coarse salt, and freshly ground pepper. Or simply leave them as is to use in a salad or as part of another recipe.

Beans are wonderful for making dishes that are hearty enough to serve as the main part of a meal or, in smaller portions, as an accompaniment to meat, fish, or chicken. Besides protein, they lend chewy texture that holds up well when tossed with vinaigrette. This dressing is made by deglazing the pan that was used to sauté the mushrooms and aromatics with vinegar, then whisking in oil. You may find that you have some left over; if you like, toss it with frisée or other salad greens, then serve the lentils over the greens. The lentils are also delicious with sausages, pan-seared tuna or roasted salmon, and duck confit.

This recipe uses a combination of steaming to soften the texture and brighten the color (especially helpful when cooking green vegetables), and sautéing in butter to increase flavor. The method is similar to blanching then sautéing, only in the same pan. This steam-sauté method can also be used to cook green beans, snow peas, green peas, asparagus, broccoli, and Brussels sprouts. In the recipe below, sautéed snap peas are combined with shaved raw baby turnips, which are slightly bitter and contrast nicely with the sweetness of the peas. Radishes would offer the same balance of taste and crunchy texture.

Bamboo steamers are tiered, allowing you to cook more than one item at a time and make a meal out of assorted components, such as the salmon and vegetables in this recipe. General rules of steaming apply no matter which implement you use. For instance, when steaming fish or other proteins, place any aromatics (such as the dill used here) directly underneath them. You could also add the aromatics to the steaming liquid (instead of or in addition to). Adding wine, vinegar, or lemon (or other citrus) juice to the steaming liquid is another way to subtly boost flavors. As with many steamed foods, this dish is equally delicious when served hot, cold, or at room temperature, making it a perfect meal for busy weeknights. The lemon yogurt sauce is a lovely accompaniment, especially when the fish is chilled before serving.

To preserve their bright green color, the peas are shocked in an ice-water bath after boiling. You can skip this step if desired, but the puree will not have the same vibrancy. Frozen peas can be substituted for fresh; boil them for two minutes.

This “white” stew borrows a nonbrowning method commonly used in making blanquette de veau, one of the canons of French cuisine. In that dish, a stew of veal, onions, and mushrooms is blanketed in a creamy sauce. The meat is never browned (hence the term “white stew”); the stock is thickened with a roux and, traditionally, a secondary thickener called a liaison, made with egg and cream, making it exceptionally rich. This recipe, however, opts for springtime produce over the usual vegetables and makes the liaison optional (you can omit the egg and just stir in the cream, without tempering). To make a classic blanquette de veau, see the variation that follows.

Buy the freshest vegetables available and only during their peak season. The ones here are at their best in mid-to late summer.

This soup is best made with farm-fresh peas, but you can substitute a ten-ounce package of frozen peas in a pinch. Since spinach and peas cook in such a short amount of time, do not add them to the pot until the stock has reached a boil. This soup is finished with lemon juice rather than cream or buttermilk. For an elegant presentation, garnish the soup with Frico (page 75).

Unlike other frying methods, stir-frying requires very high heat and very little fat. A wok is the best implement; it heats up quickly and to just the right temperature, and the shape promotes the brisk tossing about of food that is so characteristic of stir-frying. You can achieve similar results in a skillet as long as it’s large enough to accommodate all the ingredients (with room for tossing): Set the pan over high heat until very hot, add the oil and shrimp (or other items), and then adjust the heat as necessary during cooking.This method results in perfectly coated shrimp with lots of flavor, but there will not be much sauce for serving with rice (which is more authentic than heavily sauced renditions); if desired, double the amount of sauce ingredients.

A specialty of the southwest of France, cassoulet—named for cassole, the oval earthenware dish in which it was made—is a rich, slow-cooked bean stew made with white beans, meats (most often pork and sausages), and duck or goose confit. The dish is time consuming—it can take an entire day from start to finish—but is manageable when you break it into three tasks, which can be spaced out over a few days. The first step is to prepare Duck Confit (see page 232). Next the beans (which have to be soaked overnight) are cooked on the stove. Then the confit and beans are layered in a pot, along with pork and sausage, and baked for about three hours.

Vegetable stock is an essential ingredient in many vegetarian soups, but it also provides incomparable flavor to many well-loved vegetable (but not necessarily meat-free) soups such as this one. Minestrone has become so familiar in the American kitchen that it might be easy to forget its Italian origins. But the name—minestre is the word for soup, while the suffix (-one) indicates bigness—hints at its universal appeal as a simple pantry-based soup that is also hearty and substantial. The foundation of flavor, called a soffritto, is a common element in soup-making: a trio of celery, carrots, and onion is sautéed first, then stock and more vegetables are added and slowly simmered to coax out their flavors. Beans are what distinguish minestrone from other vegetable soups; the type varies by region, as does the addition (if any) of pasta or rice (this version has neither). The beans are also what give the soup such heft, making it a good option for a meatless one-pot dish (if you leave out the prosciutto) that can stand as the centerpiece of any casual dinner. The beans need to soak overnight in the refrigerator, so plan accordingly. Then they need to boil for at least a half hour, so use that time to prepare the rest of the ingredients for the soffritto and soup.

The most well-known pea soups are made with green split peas and flavored with pork, but this lively vegetarian version features split peas and Indian seasonings. Though the end result tastes remarkably different from the classic, the method for making any split pea soup is virtually the same; you start by building a flavor base with sautéed aromatics, then add peas and water and cook until the peas fall apart. For split pea soup with ham, you would add a ham hock to the pot along with the peas, but for this version, spices are fried at the end and stirred into the soup to finish—a technique borrowed from many classic Indian dishes.

I think the heart and soul of Italian cooking is coaxing the true flavor out of raw ingredients, and that’s what we do with these beans. Stracotto means “long cooked,” and for this recipe, yellow wax beans, a summer vegetable usually prepared al dente, are simmered long and slow with our deeply caramelized soffritto. You’ll want to make this dish only if you already have soffritto in your refrigerator and when yellow wax beans are in season. You could also use yellow Romano beans.

We exclusively use Umbrian lentils in our restaurants, which are smaller than common brown lentils and are various shades of brown to green. Castelluccio, the town where the lentils come from, is a two-and-a-half-hour, winding, hilly drive over the Apennine Mountains from my house. Once you get there, you don’t feel like you’re in Umbria—or Italy—at all. There are no sunflowers. No rolling green hills. The landscape is crater-like, with fields and fields of flowering lentils. It feels more like you’re on the moon, or in Oz. When I visited with a group of friends, we ate lunch at the one trattoria in town. Of course they offered lentils, and I was surprised to find them cooked in a much heartier way than I had ever seen lentils prepared before, almost like a stew or a ragù, with pork sausage, another delicacy of that region. This is Matt’s rendition of the lentils we had that day.

Italians famously eat a lot of beans, so including shell beans on our menu was an obvious choice. Shell beans are so delicious and can be prepared in such a variety of ways, and yet you don’t normally see them at conventional grocery stores. Looking for shell beans is a good excuse to visit your local farmers’ market, which is where we find them in Los Angeles in the late summer and early fall. We use a mix of four types of shell beans—borlotti beans, cannellini beans, lima beans, and flageolet—because we like the range of sizes, colors, and flavors of the various beans. Properly cooking beans is about 90 percent of the battle, which is why we cook each type of bean separately; to spare yourself the effort, use fewer varieties of beans. If you don’t have access to shell beans, or when shell beans are not in season, you could make this using dried beans. Refer to Ceci (page 96) for instructions. The recipe for the bouquet is for each pot of beans. You will need to make the same number as types of beans you are making.