This video / recipe was recently shared in !food@beehaw.org, and I thought it would be easy to make and extend my meals without having to go to the grocery store.
I tried out the recipe today using TVP as the meat substitute, and made some cornbread to go with it:
here's the recipe from the video description:
Ingredients:
- 1 lb pinto beans, soaked
- ½ pack MyBacon (mycelium bacon), diced
- 1 onion, diced
- 4–5 cloves garlic, minced
- 2 Tablespoons oil
- 2 tsp smoked paprika
- 2 tsp granulated garlic
- 2 tsp granulated onion
- 2 Bay Leaves
- 2 tsp No-Chicken Better Than Bouillon
- 8–10 cups water (for a brothy first day)
- Salt and black pepper to taste
Optional “pork” substitutes:
- Light Life tempeh bacon (diced),
- ½ block tofu (smoked tofu works great),
- soy curls (rehydrated, chopped, and roasted ahead).
Method
- Soak Beans with boiling water for 1 – 2 hours.
- Prep onions
- Drain and rinse beans
In a separate pan, render the diced MyBacon until lightly crisp with added oil. Add onion and cook until softened, then stir in the garlic.
Add seasonings and cook briefly. Add the beans and bring to a slow boil, then simmer for 1 -2 hours until beans are tender. Stirring frequently. Season with salt and black pepper. -Brothy the first day, thickens naturally the next.
Top with nutritional yeast 🔥
Ingredients I used and approximate cost:
- 200 g (~1 cup?) dry pinto beans, ~$0.75 (estimate based on what I paid for kidney beans; these were some beans I’ve stored in my pantry for a while, I don’t know what price I paid)
- 157 g (2 small) onions, normally ~$0.55 for this amount, but I found a deal and actually paid $0.07
- 25 g canola oil (I don’t have cost estimate for this, but oil is expensive)
- 13 g garlic, ~$0.14
- 79 g (~1 scant cup) dry TVP, (I don’t have cost estimate for this, but TVP is usually fairly cheap)
I would guess it’s less than $5 for the whole pot.
I don’t bother to measure lots of ingredients, so I don’t have a cost estimate for other things I threw in there to help it out:
- spices (like paprika)
- miso
- better-than-bouillon
- soy sauce
- mushroom seasoning powder
- MSG
It sorta tastes like it needs more veg, like maybe a can of diced tomatoes. It’s a lot like a chili in some ways, so I keep wanting to add tomatoes. I bet potato would be good in it too, if you wanted to make it more like a smoky potato & bean soup dish.
A bowl with a slice of cornbread & a dollop of vegenaise (for creaminess, instead of sour cream) came to under $2 and had these nutrients:
- 580 kcal
- 23 g fat
- 60 g carbs
- 23 g protein
- 1.8 g fiber
I hope this tasted great, but if I am being honest, the picture looks like aweful slop. Please tell me it was delicious so I can sleep happily.
It was pretty delicious, very similar to chili - but I personally felt it would have been better if it were expanded a bit more, maybe small, cubed potatoes to help add starch (I maybe rinsed my beans too much after cooking), or better yet is to lean into its chili profile and use diced tomatoes.
It was pretty tasty, though - despite the brown slop look.
To be honest, the recipe is not impressive and not helping my biased perspective that “all” vegan recipes are terrible (i.e. most vegan recipes create terrible tasting dishes) - it really do be like that. When I was a strict vegan, I usually would lookup non-vegan recipes and then learn techniques to adapt them to be vegan. That was usually more successful than starting with a vegan recipe.
I think the reason vegan recipes are so terrible might relate to how much overlap exists between vegan food culture and health food culture (like, going back at least over a century - e.g. checkout at the Grahamites of the 19th century), so there is kind of an inherent asceticism in vegan food culture on average, I find.
(Just to be fair, notable exceptions to vegan asceticism I know of include SauceStache and Bryant Terry, both of whom seem invested in making food that actually tastes good. Even if the generalization holds in my experience, it’s not really all vegan recipes.)
I had to add a lot of ingredients not in the recipe to make it suitably rich and tasty - like I added liquid smoke, some vegan Worcestershire sauce, white miso, mushroom seasoning powder, etc.
My guess, by the ingriedents, is that it tasted good. I imagine it tastes like savory pinto beans but if you want to try a more authentic recipe, search for Charro bean recipes.