Confit chipotle-spiced beans
Sometimes with cooking it's the hands-on time that gets you. Maybe you're - oh, I don't know - working from home but also really busy? Elapsed time – no problem. You can do something else while that casserole bubbles, but the forty minutes to prep it is a bit of an ask.
I don't have many recipes for those days. I can make cheese on toast take half an hour. I do have this.
(I would also recommend Jamie Oliver's wonderfully fire-and-forget peposo, Jamie’s Italy p213)
It's extremely cribbed from Noor Murad, an Ottolenghi recipe developer who put a super easy confit take on chana masala on her Instagram. It's a breathtakingly simple "why didn't I think of that?" of an idea: put everything in a pot and let the oil sort it out.
I recommend trying it. It's tasty and the prep time is barely ten minutes. It also made me wonder what would happen if you tried to take the same route around a bean chilli, or something like a tinga poblana.
Well, this is what happens.
Ingredients:
Kidney beans, 1 tin
Black-eyed beans, 1 tin
Baby plum tomatoes, 350g
Onion, 1 medium
Garlic, 6 cloves
Olive oil, 100ml
Tomato puree: 1.5tbsp
Chipotles in adobo, 2 (and extra teaspoons of the sauce to taste)
Cumin seeds, 1tsp
Allspice, 1/2tsp
Oregano, 1tsp
Thyme, ¼ tsp
A little salt
Optional:
Sweet potato, about 300g
Feta and coriander to garnish
You could use any combination of kidney, black-eyed, or borlotti beans for this. I'd stay off butter, haricot, or cannellini - it might come out a bit anemic.
You can get chipotles in adobo online. Alternatively, many supermarkets will sell you a chipotle paste, and I'd guess a tablespoon would do. Or toss in two small dried chipotles if you have those.
Instructions:
Heat the oven to 160c
If you're using the sweet potato (it adds bulk and makes this more of a one pot meal), peel it, dice it roughly, and toss it in oil. Put it on an oven tray reasonably well spaced, and put it in the oven.
Roughly grind the cumin seeds with a little salt. Peel the garlic. Rinse the beans. Cut the onion into rough dice.
Put everything in a fairly shallow lidded casserole or oven dish. Stir it a bit, cover, and put it in the oven for an hour. Half way through, stir gently and return to the oven.
If you're using the sweet potato, remove it from the oven around the 40 minutes mark.
That's it.
You should have soft, somewhat oily, deeply flavoursome beans. Before serving you can garnish with some coriander and crumbled feta if you like, or stir through the roasted sweet potato.
You could also just eat it with a spoon. But I'd suggest with flour tortillas and maybe some kind of lime dressing or pico de gallo. You could put it on toast, too. It’s baked beans after all.
Or, right, baked potatoes. Fuck yeah. Little bit of cheese on top 👌
If you're feeling implacably carnivorous, throw in a hundred grams or so of rough chopped chorizo before it goes into the oven. I don’t think it needs it, but you do you.