Beans, Again

05 Dec 2024 Leave a comment

by gingerchef in beans, industrial food

It’s a four-pots-of-beans kind of day . . .

If you read about food, you probably know about the Rancho Gordo Bean Club: four times a year, members receive a box of six pounds of beans, plus a sheet of recipes (one for each type of bean), plus something extra, plus a code for free shipping for one order from Rancho Gordo. The November box always has a calendar, popping corn, and black-eyed peas, but otherwise the “extra” thing could be a container of some kind of spice, or some grain, or a bean that they don’t have in large enough quantities to sell on the website. They don’t say ahead of time what beans will be in the box, so it’s actually a surprise package (and there are few enough good surprises left in the world). All in all, for someone like me who eats beans at least four days a week most weeks, it’s truly wonderful. 

I have two pots that are suitable for making beans, a stockpot-type pot (which is actually too small to use for a major production of stock) and a 6-quart sauté pan; when I’m going to make beans, I get both of those going, make two pots of beans, and, when they’re done, make two MORE pots of beans, without even bothering to wash the pots between batches. I end up with 46-48 meals’ worth of beans. I also have a million small plastic containers that originally housed fresh mozzarella from the farmers’ market, so I can portion the beans, Sharpie the type of bean on the lid, and freeze them, not to mention track them on the whiteboard.

So how do I eat so many beans? The dinner version is beans, greens (spinach, chard, or kale, depending on the CSA season), some other vegetable (roasted tomatoes; roasted squash; roasted sweet potatoes; carrots; beets), and a grain (barley, bulgar, farro, wild rice), with cheese on top. When I’m feeling especially adventurous, I’ll toss in a spice mix from Penzey’s. I also throw them into any stew-like dish I’m making, such as last week’s turkey pot pie—I had two containers of pintos that had been in the freezer forever. If I make fish tacos, I’ll heat up and then sorta mash some beans. 

I’ve been a member of the bean club for at least five years, I think—maybe more—and it continues to be one of my favorite things. I’ve learned about more varieties of beans than I even knew existed, and I get to support a purveyor who searches out heirloom (rather than commodity) types of beans. Apparently, when Steve Sando first started looking for farmers to grow his beans, they thought he wanted the commodity beans; he said, no, I want the beans your grandmother grows. Today’s beans are Borlotti Lamon, buckeye, garbanzo, and royal corona (essentially, huge white limas); I’ll probably make some pasta e fagioli with some of the Borlottis and a curry of some kind with some of the the garbanzos, but most of both batches will be dinner. 

I also started saving a bean from each batch and planting it, with no expectations—shockingly, they grew, even on my windowsill, even in winter, when it’s light for about 15 minutes a day. The biggest challenge indoors was the varieties that are pole beans rather than bush beans—they climbed my blinds and anything else they could find. And I’ve harvested beans, as well, which is even more entertaining. (When I have enough, I’m going to make a batch that consists of only the beans I’ve grown.) Now that winter is here I have to figure out where to plant the little pile of beans I’ve saved, preferably in a place where they can climb something other than my blinds. They didn’t do well on the back porch this summer (not enough light, perhaps).

Build Me Up, Buttercup

01 Dec 2024 Leave a comment

by gingerchef in Uncategorized Tags: , ,

My downstairs neighbor likes to host Thanksgiving (in the form of Friendsgiving) every year; she provides the turkey, gravy, and cranberry sauce, and a collection of others bring veggies and sides. I typically bring a vegetable (this year I roasted our combined stash of Brussels sprouts), at least one dessert (this year was creme brûlée with caramelized apples at the bottom of the dish), sometimes an appetizer (I made cheese puffs but then left them in my freezer; we’ll have some with wine later this week), and bread. This year I thought I would combine some recipes from the sourdough section of King Arthur’s new Big Book of Bread and an episode of The Great British Baking Show, specifically the episode where Paul Hollywood demonstrates a seven-strand braided ring. That is, rather than using Paul’s formula, I thought I’d use a sourdough formula that had approximately the same weight of flour. There was another formula nearby in the book, which I thought would be a way to use the rest of my discard. Both formulae called for unfed starter, so I thought at least one would work, and I could use the rest of any dough for rolls or a formed loaf or whatever.

This link shows what the finished loaf is supposed to look like. This, however, is what my dough actually looked like:

And the other formula? The “safety” formula? No better:

I tried to bake some of the sourdough dough as rolls, but they came out like dense little slightly raised pancakes. The flavor actually isn’t terrible, but the texture is quite bad. They’ll still get consumed, but, oof, definitely a failure. 

Because of all of this fail, on Thanksgiving day, I whipped up another batch of rolls from another King Arthur baking book; the recipe used yeast instead of my starter, and they came out just fine. Quite nice, in fact, with a lovely sweetish taste from the whole wheat. I only made two substitutions. First, I didn’t have any rye flour, so I just used more whole wheat. Second, I didn’t have either orange juice or an orange, but I did have some orange sugar (orange rind mixed with sugar, which I had in the freezer as the leftovers from some other experiment), so I subbed in some orange sugar for both the juice and some of the honey the recipe listed. It provided a subtle tang and sweetness that complemented the whole wheat flour nicely.

I put the two sheet pans of failure dough in the fridge, covered with greased plastic wrap, and figured I’d come back to it on Friday, though I had no idea what I was going to do with the massive quantities. I really did not want to throw it out; way too much flour was involved, and it seemed like such a waste. Finally it came to me: crackersI’ve seen recipes that basically just use sourdough discard for crackers (though I haven’t tried that), and I’ve made my own crackers using Peter Reinhardt’s formula from his whole-grain baking book. I also had a bunch of King Arthur’s Harvest Grains Blend, because it’s a good shorthand add-in when I want to add something to a basic loaf or to waffles or pancakes.

I tried multiple methods along the way—kneading some of the grains into the dough, then rolling it out as thin as possible; rolling it out and then rolling the grains into the dough that way; and, finally, doing the latter and adding some olive oil on top. The first pan didn’t bake very well; one side got brown but the other did not. I kept going, though, and made sure I baked everything through. As you can see here, even crackers that are baked through aren’t necessarily brown on both sides. But! They’re tasty, and crunchy, and I didn’t have to throw out all of that Faildough.

My biggest takeaway—which, frankly, I already knew but somehow keep thinking is going to change by magic—is that my starter isn’t very strong and needs to be built up to use it. It works just fine for my two most common uses, waffles and pizza dough, but if I want to bake bread with it, I really need to build it up before I use it.