Friday, January 24, 2014

Black beans, Venezuelan Style.

Black beans are THE thing to eat in my country. Black beans rule the whole world!!!!

If you make them well.

I will give you the recipe on how to make them from dry beans but you are more than welcome to use can beans, just use good quality ones and rinse the soupy thing that is in the can.

Take the dry beans, look through them for stones or little twigs, rinse them twice in cold water. Put them in a big bowl and fill it up with water,you want a lot of water on top of the beans. Add a TBSP of baking Soda, mix and let it sit on the counter over night.

In the morning rinse them and then put them in a big pot with a lot of water covering the beans. Add salt, 4 whole cloves of garlic, half of an onion (cut in two) and if you have, a ham bone or some pork product.

Let it boil and stir every once in a while, when the water reduces to the surface of the beans add more hot water. Repeat this process until the beans are really soft. Remove the big pieces of garlic and onion.

I usually do this in the morning while I'm doing laundry or cleaning, I just come back to it and stir or add water.

While waiting you can dice an onion, very small, 4 cloves of garlic, 1 red pepper, 1 green pepper and saute it all with some bacon or just alone. You need to keep everything in low heat for at least 10 minutes, after 5 minutes you want to add some cumin  (about 2 tsp), oregano (about 1 tsp), salt and pepper. Keep cooking, once it's done it will look more like mashed veggies or very mushy veggies.

Add them to the pot of beans and start mashing them with a potato masher. You want to mash about a fourth of the beans. Keep cooking for another 20 minutes in low heat. They should be somewhat creamy at the end. Make sure to taste for salt.

That is it!
I usually make a huge pot use it and then freeze the rest.

Enjoy, they are worth the trouble ;-)

1 comment:

  1. Belky-how much dry beans do you start with? Just wondering because you have measurements for everything except the amount of beans. Thanks! So excited to try this!

    ReplyDelete