bean – Gourmet Project

No recipe for this one.

These beans were fine, completely middle of the road fine. They’re pretty standard soaked black beans with a bit of bacon, green pepper, cider vinegar, and a bay leaf added. The effect of these added flavours was very subtle, so subtle you might not notice them at all. I tried them again a couple of days later, and the flavours were a bit more pronounced, but they could still slip under the radar.

That said, beans aren’t really meant to be the star of the show most of the time, and these were a perfectly good accompaniment to the pork tenderloin I served them with. They had a fairly good texture, with a bit of resistance left to them. Some of the beans broke down and thickened the cooking liquid. They might have been better if they ended up with a little more liquid, but I didn’t want to add water right at the end.

I know nothing about Cuban food, but I certainly wouldn’t have guessed Cuban if you’d asked me to guess the origin of the recipe. There aren’t a heck of a lot of Cuban restaurants around here, so I don’t have an opportunity to compare this to any gold standard. If you’re looking for a straightforward black bean recipe that won’t get in the way of anything else you’re serving you could certainly do much worse than these beans. I wouldn’t expect anyone to write home about them though.

the recipe

I love cold green bean salads, they’re so quintessentially French countryside. When I’m eating them I can’t help but feel I’m sitting in the back garden of the old farmhouse, outside Lyons, I stayed at one summer as a teenager.

This dish wasn’t particularly French, or entirely what I expected it to be, but that’s all right. I think the word “salad” threw me off a bit here. I was expecting the dressing to turn out like a vinaigrette, but it’s actually more of a pesto; very thick and densely coating the green beans. The ingredients in the dressing are straight out of the classic vinaigrette textbook: oil, lemon juice, salt, garlic, olive oil. But there’s a detour via Mexico with pumpkin seeds, cumin, and cilantro. I found that the flavour was quite good, if a bit heavy on the cumin, but the texture was off. The dressing came out kind of lumpy and goopy. I didn’t think that it worked too well with the beans. There was also far too much dressing for the amount of beans they called for. If I were to make this again I’d toast the pumpkin seeds and scatter them over the beans without putting them through the blender. I’m sure the dressing would come together nicely without them.

The beans were nicely crisp-tender, and the flavour deserves high marks. I also appreciate the Franco-Mexican fusion concept going on here. It’s really the texture that prevents me from giving this the rating it might otherwise have earned.