I recently discovered a fantastic new deli on Rode Road: Loria Deli. It has an excellent range of cheeses and also dried food. A recent trip saw me walk away with a bag of black turtle beans. Dried beans take a little more work and foresight than canned ones, but they are easy to store and usually quite a bit cheaper than tinned beans. Also, you can get a far greater variety of dried beans than the range of tinned ones available in most supermarkets.
I used half a small chorizo sausage in a pasta dish (recipe to come) and was wondering what to do with the remaining 1 1/2 sausages. A bit of google research led me to this website and I found the perfect dish to try out my new beans.
You can increase the amount of spice if you wish - I would probably increase them as I like a bit of kick in my chilli. The chorizo adds a wonderful depth and richness to the dish and the beans help it stick to your ribs. If you are using dried beans, you need to soak them overnight and then drain off the water before cooking. You can either cook them separately and add towards the end, or add at the beginning and let the chilli simmer for a few hours until the beans are tender. You may need to add more water throughout the cooking process. I didn’t want to dirty another pot, and I had a bit of time to spare, so I cooked mine with the chilli. I think it helped the flavours to develop. If you used tinned beans, you will basically just be warming them, so the cooking time is greatly reduced.
I enjoyed this dish during the rainy weather at the beginning of the week, but it has started getting far too hot to enjoy a big bowl of chilli… More salads will be making their way onto the menu.
Ingredients
- 1.5 Chorizo sausages, diced
- 1 tablespoon Olive oil
- 1 cup Onion, diced
- 1/2 cup Green capsicum, seeded and diced
- 2 cloves Garlic, minced
- 1 cup Black beans, soaked overnight or two tins black beans or kidney beans
- 1.5 cups Beef stock
- 1 tablespoon Chilli powder
- 1 teaspoon Ground cumin
- 1 teaspoon Dried oregano
- 1/2 teaspoon Dried thyme
- 1/4 teaspoon Dried chilli flakes
- 1 teaspoon Salt (or to taste)
- 1/2 teaspoon Ground pepper or to taste
Directions
- Heat oil in a dutch over or large saucepan over medium-high heat.
- Add onion, green capsicum and chorizo. Saute for about 5 minutes.
- Add remaining ingredients.
- Bring to the boil, then reduce heat and simmer until the beans are cooked. Stir occasionally. If the beans have been soaked but not cooked this will probably take 2-3 hours and you may need to add more water several times. If they are pre-cooked it should only take 30 minutes or so. A tip though, the longer you cook it the more the flavours will develop.
- Serve with various sides - avocado, corn chips, sour cream or natural yoghurt, cheese, rice.
This recipe makes a hearty dinner, and the leftovers would be delicious for breakfast also. Although this version uses bacon, I’m sure this could be omitted to make the meal vegetarian (and also vegan). We didn’t have any greens with the meal (tut tut) but now that I think of it, a side of spinach or zucchini would have been lovely.
Don’t be intimidated by this dish. Although it requires a bit of foresight (you have to soak the beans the night before), and quite a bit of cooking time (up to 4 hours), it is dead easy. We only made half the recipe, but if you made the full amount you could freeze portions for an easy dinner on another night. And these baked beans leave the tinned version for dead.
Details
15 min
240 min
4 h, 15 min
Ingredients
- 500 grams Dried cannelini beans, soaked overnight
- 2 tbsps Mustard powder
- 1/4 cup Treacle
- 1/4 cup Brown sugar
- 2 Cloves
- 1 Onion, halved
- 100 grams Smoked pork belly or bacon, roughly chopped
- 2 Bay leaves
- Olive oil
- 400 grams Tin chopped tomatoes
- 1/4 cup Red wine vinegar
- Sea salt and pepper
- 1 tbsp Chopped mint
Directions
- Drain and rinse the beans. Cover with fresh water and bring to boil in a saucepan.
- Reduce the heat to low and simmer for about 45 minutes. Drain and leave to cool.
- Mix together mustard powder and water to make a paste.
- Add treacle and brown sugar and stir well - it will form a thick paste.
- Preheat the oven to 150* (mine isn't fan-forced).
- Spike each onion half with a clove.
- Splash some olive oil into a dutch oven. Add the onion halves, bacon and bay leaves.
- Cook over a medium heat on the stove for about 5 minutes.
- Add tomatoes and mustard mixture and stir to combine.
- Add the beans and cover with a tight-fitting lid.
- Maggie suggests baking for 4 hours, or until the beans are cooked. There is no way my beans took that long to cook, so just keep an eye on them and play by ear.
- Remove the lid for the last 30 minutes of cooking and add the red-wine vinegar.
- Season with salt and pepper.
- Once the beans are ready, add the mint and adjust seasoning as necessary. If they are still a bit too sweet for you, stir through a little more vinegar. Use a light touch, because if you add too much vinegar there will be no fixing it!
- We served our with some crusty bread. A few greens might also be a good idea!
Unfortunately I can’t take credit for this recipe - this comes for the blog “For the love of cooking” and as she says, she has been perfecting it for 12 years now. I have to say, it’s a pretty great recipe.
Of course, I can’t seem to follow a recipe exactly, so here are my changes. Instead of stew meat I used beef mince. I used a whole red capsicum and a whole green one for both flavour and colour. I omitted the garlic powder as I don’t have any. I omitted the can of green chillies and instead added zucchini. I just used a small tub of tomato paste instead of tomato sauce. And I used 2 tins of kidney beans instead of other beans. If you’re a vegetarian, just omit the beef – I’ve made it several times without and it’s still lovely.
To serve, I added natural yoghurt, grated cheddar, sliced spring onions, and avocado mixed with lemon juice, salt and pepper. Usually I would serve with rice, but I had leftover cous-cous to use up. I topped with a healthy serve of corn chips for crunch.
This recipe makes at least 4 large man-sized serves, so we divided up the remain and froze it for a meal at a later date. I recommed you start this recipe early in the day so the flavours of the chilli have time to blend and develop. As the smells waft through the house it will be very difficult to resist scooping up a portion early but I promise it is worth the wait!
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20.12.10 | 
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