Wyoming · Side
Wyoming Chuckwagon Beans
- Intermediate
- 3 h 30 m
- roughly 2 of 4 for cost
Leads with a sweet edge rounding the corners, a warm current of chile, opening aromatic and staying there.
Ingredients
- 500g dried pinto beans, soaked overnight
- 200g salt pork or bacon, diced
- 1 onion, diced
- 4 garlic cloves
- 2 tbsp molasses
- 2 tbsp brown sugar
- 2 tbsp tomato paste
- 1 tbsp mustard powder
- 1 tsp chili powder
- 1.5L water or stock
- Salt and pepper
Equipment
Dutch oven
The skills inside
Sweating aromatics: soft, never brownedRendering fat: and cooking in what runs outSoaking dried goods back to life
Allergen screen
Found: mustard
Screened for: gluten, dairy, egg, nuts, peanuts, fish, shellfish, molluscs, soy, sesame, celery, mustard, lupin, alcohol. Not screened: sulphites.
Screened by keyword from the ingredient list, not reviewed by a person; check every label for what the list cannot show.
Method
- Render the salt pork in a Dutch oven until crisp, then sweat the onion and garlic in the fat.
- Add the tomato paste and cook 2 min, then the molasses, sugar, mustard, and chili powder. 2 min
- Add the drained beans and water, cover, and simmer 2-3 hours until creamy, adding water as needed. 180 min
- Uncover for the last 30 min so the liquid reduces to a thick sauce. 30 min
- Salt only at the end and season with pepper.
How to tell it is going right
This dish has no standard of its own yet. It is judged on the techniques it exercises: checked at the pan, while there is still something to be done about it.
Soaking dried goods back to life 69 recipes
- Fully submerged with room to swell: the level is well above everything at the start and still above it at the end.
- Given the full time, and judged by what is in the bowl rather than by the hours on the clock.
- Tested at the CENTRE of the largest piece, cut or pressed. Anything with a hard dry core will still have one after cooking, because the outside softens first and stops the water getting further in.
- The soaking water was dealt with on purpose: kept because it holds flavour, or thrown away because it holds what should not be eaten, but never simply left undecided.
- Drained before it is used, so the dish does not silently gain all the water that came with it.
Where it goes wrong Too little water, or too little time. The pieces swell until they are packed tight against each other and the ones in the middle never fully take up water; they will not soften later in the dish either, so the finished plate has hard pieces scattered through it.
Rendering fat: and cooking in what runs out 73 recipes
- It started cold or low and came up slowly: fat that met a hot pan seizes and scorches before the inside can melt, and there is no recovering it.
- The fat in the pan is clear and clean-smelling, pale to golden, with no dark sediment on the floor and nothing acrid in the steam.
- What is left behind is crisp and deep gold with no soft pale fat still clinging to it and no black burnt edges.
- There is a real volume of it: enough to film the pan floor and be poured off and kept, not a dry smear that never ran.
- Whatever cooks in it browns in it and takes its flavour, rather than sitting in a greasy pool that never gets hot enough to colour anything.
Where it goes wrong The heat was raised to hurry it along, so the outside seized and browned before the interior fat could melt; very little runs out, and the solids come out burnt on the outside and rubbery within.
At the Table
- The Pour
- Riesling or Grenache
- Also Right
- Cru Beaujolais
- From the Taps
- Farmhouse saison
- Zero-Proof
- Cloudy apple juice, chilled
Pork loves fruit and gentle sweetness: orchard-note whites and low-tannin reds flatter it where heavy oak flattens.
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