Of bacon, beans, and Brazil
A few months ago, the largish software company I work for put together a little corporate shindig to celebrate something or other -- diversity, or making quarterly profit targets, or the CEO being acquitted -- some such thing. I don't pay enough attention to know for sure. I think there may have been belly dancers.
The attention that I refused to pay to corporate lip service I spent instead on the free food. As usual, most of it was low-grade slop designed to feed lots of people without the company shelling out too badly. I did, however, run into one dish that first caught my eye, then hooked me through the gullet.
This was feijoada, the national dish of Brazil, which is to pork and beans what a 1982 Château Lafite Rothschild Magnum is to Diet Mountain Dew. Well, perhaps that's a bad comparision -- but I'll get into the reason later.
To try to describe the feijoada I had that day would work the word "savory" into the ground. I might have better luck with "umami," but lots of people don't know what that means, and I suspect that that really includes the people who do know what it means -- it's a lot harder to put your finger on than, say, "bitter" or "artificial cherry". I think, perhaps, that my best option may be to go with "awesome" with an option on the -tronic or -tastic suffixes, and leave it at that. Anyway, you get the picture. It was good.
Dennis, the meat-and-potatoes chef at the café at work, was serving, and gave me a little background on the dish. Slaves in Brazil, he said, would make it from mostly beans and any leftover bits of meat they had -- pork ears, hocks, and cheeks, sausages, dried beef, whatever -- and it caught on from there. This fits the pattern I've observed: oppressed peoples tend to come up with the best cooking, while the very rich eat things that are dull, inferior, and sometimes revolting, just because they're expensive. For centuries, it was only the very rich who ate white bread.
The other implication of the origin of feijoada is that it is by necessity cheap. Beans aren't worth beans, and the bulk of the meat comprises the less desired parts of any food animal you care to name. Any other ingredients tend to be bulky vegetables like squash -- one recipe in fact calls for pumpkin -- and cabbage, and it is traditionally served over rice. In all likelihood, this is the quality that allowed it to qualify as Corporate Event Food.
All of this information receded quietly to the back of my brain, presumably to simmer.
❀ ❀ ❀
Fast-forward to early August. While making the cardinal mistake of shopping hungry, I was led into Temptation by a three-pound box of "bacon ends and pieces." I strapped it to the hood of my car and came home triumphant, only to run into the obvious question: Now what?
All right, yeah, it's obvious where this is going. Still, it took me two days to get as far as "hey, bacon is good in beans." That was a major leap, though, and suddenly I had the spark of inspiration burning within me. I spent a few days studying recipes, and, in a giant canning vat, made this:
darksasami's Large Quantity of Experimental Bacony Beans
1 lb each black, red, and pink beans
3 lbs bacon ends and pieces, vaguely trimmed of major fat blobs, cut into 1" lengths, and sautéed
3 smoked ham hocks
1 lb chorizo (Mexican style), sautéed
1 onion, diced and sautéed in olive oil
1 bulb garlic, diced and sautéed in olive oil
1 large tomato, diced
½ bottle of Cholula hot sauce
4 tbsp chili powder
2 tbsp cumin
1 small jar of dried cilantro that was lying around doing nothing
5 bay leaves
1.5 qts beef stock
1 large quantity of water (which turned out to be a bit too much)
Sort beans, then soak in hot water for two hours. Drain. (Yes, some sources say overnight, but if I can't trust The Joy of Cooking, I can't trust anyone.)
Dump beans in stock with lots of water and heat. Sauté garlic and onions in olive oil, then trim bacon into skillet. When each skilletful of bacon is done, dump into pot. Discard large mound of bacon fat wistfully.
Cook chorizo in skillet, and wonder whether the recipes calling for it actually meant the solid kind of chorizo. (They did.) Dump into pot. Guiltily think about trying to skim off the bacon fat and chorizo fat now floating on top. Decide to get to it later.
Add all other ingredients. After about four hours, remove 1 cup beans, mash them into refried beans, add them back to the pot and stir.
Simmer for something like 17 hours because you really want it to be thicker than that. You didn't intend to make bean soup. Notice that after this long, the beans have absorbed the fat from the surface, thus adding flavor and calories. Have mixed feelings about that.
Hope you've got room in the freezer.
Now, I've never claimed to be a cook. When I'm not eating out, which is far too often, I usually eat something out of a can -- unheated -- because frozen things take too much prep time. Really, who has twenty minutes to waste on something they're just going to eat anyway?
But the case seems to be that I can cook, provided that the quantity is large enough. I've roasted large birds quite passably, and ruined individual pieces of chicken. It must simply be that the margin for error increases in size with the meal. Regardless of whether it was my fault or not, the beans did earn universal praise from everyone who tried them, and kept me fed and happy for a good two weeks.
But the urge to strike again is rising, and this time I've made the connection between my bean-craving and the feijoada that had taken me by surprise before. This time, I'm scaling up the operation, and attempting a full-scale frontal feijoada assault. I've made a spreadsheet that contrasts all of the ingredients used in a number of different regional feijoada recipes, and used it to construct my own monstrosity. So far I'm at 6 lbs of beans and 13 lbs of meat, plus additional vegetables. Why don't I just stick to one of the proven feijoada recipes? Because I don't really know what I'm doing, which puts anything I try in considerable risk; and if I'm going to fail, on the whole, I would rather fail big. Among the more exciting ingredients I'll be trying this time are:
❀ ❀ ❀
One thing that has struck me is that, as much as I revel in the hearty meatiness of the dish, I'm not convinced that any part of it besides the smoke flavor is really central to the flavor. If that's the case, then I would think that tempeh, tofu, or any other vegetable protein substitutions might be acceptable, even to me, with sufficient application of liquid smoke. There's really no question of a texture problem, as all of the meat that goes into it becomes vanishingly tender, and the real texture of the dish is supplied by the beans. Bulk it up with squash, collard greens, potatoes and okra added in the last 15 minutes of cooking, then serve over rice, and I might never notice the difference. There are even ways to make vegetarian chorizo. It's got to beat the "cheeks, salivary glands, and lymph nodes" as marked on the real chorizo package.
The attention that I refused to pay to corporate lip service I spent instead on the free food. As usual, most of it was low-grade slop designed to feed lots of people without the company shelling out too badly. I did, however, run into one dish that first caught my eye, then hooked me through the gullet.
This was feijoada, the national dish of Brazil, which is to pork and beans what a 1982 Château Lafite Rothschild Magnum is to Diet Mountain Dew. Well, perhaps that's a bad comparision -- but I'll get into the reason later.
To try to describe the feijoada I had that day would work the word "savory" into the ground. I might have better luck with "umami," but lots of people don't know what that means, and I suspect that that really includes the people who do know what it means -- it's a lot harder to put your finger on than, say, "bitter" or "artificial cherry". I think, perhaps, that my best option may be to go with "awesome" with an option on the -tronic or -tastic suffixes, and leave it at that. Anyway, you get the picture. It was good.
Dennis, the meat-and-potatoes chef at the café at work, was serving, and gave me a little background on the dish. Slaves in Brazil, he said, would make it from mostly beans and any leftover bits of meat they had -- pork ears, hocks, and cheeks, sausages, dried beef, whatever -- and it caught on from there. This fits the pattern I've observed: oppressed peoples tend to come up with the best cooking, while the very rich eat things that are dull, inferior, and sometimes revolting, just because they're expensive. For centuries, it was only the very rich who ate white bread.
The other implication of the origin of feijoada is that it is by necessity cheap. Beans aren't worth beans, and the bulk of the meat comprises the less desired parts of any food animal you care to name. Any other ingredients tend to be bulky vegetables like squash -- one recipe in fact calls for pumpkin -- and cabbage, and it is traditionally served over rice. In all likelihood, this is the quality that allowed it to qualify as Corporate Event Food.
All of this information receded quietly to the back of my brain, presumably to simmer.
❀ ❀ ❀
Fast-forward to early August. While making the cardinal mistake of shopping hungry, I was led into Temptation by a three-pound box of "bacon ends and pieces." I strapped it to the hood of my car and came home triumphant, only to run into the obvious question: Now what?
All right, yeah, it's obvious where this is going. Still, it took me two days to get as far as "hey, bacon is good in beans." That was a major leap, though, and suddenly I had the spark of inspiration burning within me. I spent a few days studying recipes, and, in a giant canning vat, made this:
darksasami's Large Quantity of Experimental Bacony Beans
1 lb each black, red, and pink beans
3 lbs bacon ends and pieces, vaguely trimmed of major fat blobs, cut into 1" lengths, and sautéed
3 smoked ham hocks
1 lb chorizo (Mexican style), sautéed
1 onion, diced and sautéed in olive oil
1 bulb garlic, diced and sautéed in olive oil
1 large tomato, diced
½ bottle of Cholula hot sauce
4 tbsp chili powder
2 tbsp cumin
1 small jar of dried cilantro that was lying around doing nothing
5 bay leaves
1.5 qts beef stock
1 large quantity of water (which turned out to be a bit too much)
Sort beans, then soak in hot water for two hours. Drain. (Yes, some sources say overnight, but if I can't trust The Joy of Cooking, I can't trust anyone.)
Dump beans in stock with lots of water and heat. Sauté garlic and onions in olive oil, then trim bacon into skillet. When each skilletful of bacon is done, dump into pot. Discard large mound of bacon fat wistfully.
Cook chorizo in skillet, and wonder whether the recipes calling for it actually meant the solid kind of chorizo. (They did.) Dump into pot. Guiltily think about trying to skim off the bacon fat and chorizo fat now floating on top. Decide to get to it later.
Add all other ingredients. After about four hours, remove 1 cup beans, mash them into refried beans, add them back to the pot and stir.
Simmer for something like 17 hours because you really want it to be thicker than that. You didn't intend to make bean soup. Notice that after this long, the beans have absorbed the fat from the surface, thus adding flavor and calories. Have mixed feelings about that.
Hope you've got room in the freezer.
Now, I've never claimed to be a cook. When I'm not eating out, which is far too often, I usually eat something out of a can -- unheated -- because frozen things take too much prep time. Really, who has twenty minutes to waste on something they're just going to eat anyway?
But the case seems to be that I can cook, provided that the quantity is large enough. I've roasted large birds quite passably, and ruined individual pieces of chicken. It must simply be that the margin for error increases in size with the meal. Regardless of whether it was my fault or not, the beans did earn universal praise from everyone who tried them, and kept me fed and happy for a good two weeks.
But the urge to strike again is rising, and this time I've made the connection between my bean-craving and the feijoada that had taken me by surprise before. This time, I'm scaling up the operation, and attempting a full-scale frontal feijoada assault. I've made a spreadsheet that contrasts all of the ingredients used in a number of different regional feijoada recipes, and used it to construct my own monstrosity. So far I'm at 6 lbs of beans and 13 lbs of meat, plus additional vegetables. Why don't I just stick to one of the proven feijoada recipes? Because I don't really know what I'm doing, which puts anything I try in considerable risk; and if I'm going to fail, on the whole, I would rather fail big. Among the more exciting ingredients I'll be trying this time are:
- Corned beef
- Polish sausage
- Plantains
- Italian parsley
- A whole orange, sliced in half
❀ ❀ ❀
One thing that has struck me is that, as much as I revel in the hearty meatiness of the dish, I'm not convinced that any part of it besides the smoke flavor is really central to the flavor. If that's the case, then I would think that tempeh, tofu, or any other vegetable protein substitutions might be acceptable, even to me, with sufficient application of liquid smoke. There's really no question of a texture problem, as all of the meat that goes into it becomes vanishingly tender, and the real texture of the dish is supplied by the beans. Bulk it up with squash, collard greens, potatoes and okra added in the last 15 minutes of cooking, then serve over rice, and I might never notice the difference. There are even ways to make vegetarian chorizo. It's got to beat the "cheeks, salivary glands, and lymph nodes" as marked on the real chorizo package.