Quick post about recipes and dried vs. canned beans

I got a post about Musamman curry coming up, but I thought I would post some quick thoughts about cooking in general in the meantime.

For a while, I vacillated between using dried vs. canned beans.  Canned beans sure are convenient.  Open the can, rinse the beans, plop them in your dish, and you are done.  Who could argue with that?  With dried beans, sometimes it seems like you have to cook forever before the beans get done.  If you are like me, sometimes you get impatient and settle for somewhat undercooked beans.  Why bother with dried ones?  Well, the answer is that if you go with canned beans, you lose a great ingredient - bean broth.  When you think about it, after the beans have cooked for a while, you have that yummy, thick, brown broth that has a lot of vitamins and flavor.  With canned beans, I always rinse the beans.  Maybe it is just me, but I don't trust the liquid in there.  It just seems kinda gross.  The precursor and critical component to many Mexican dishes is bean broth.

Using dried beans really isn't that much more difficult.  First, soak the beans overnight in salt water (oh, about 1 Tbsp/quart).  This will start the process of softening the beans.  Water alone isn't nearly as good as salt water.  The second way to speed up the process is to add some baking soda to what you are cooking, especially if there are tomatoes in the dish you are cooking.  Baking soda is basic and bases greatly accelerate the cooking of beans.  Tomatoes are acidic, so anathema to rapid cooking unless you counter with baking soda.  I usually go with around 1/4 tsp in the dish, so not much.  Using these steps, your beans will cook in 15-30 minutes, depending on the type.

The other point I wanted to make is, don't believe any recipe.  Be parsimonious when added strongly flavored ingredients - lime juice, chilies, cardamon, etc.  Once you add it, you can't take it back.  Even recipes from the cooks that I admire mostly sometimes include drunken sailor type additions of certain ingredients.  You can generally always add more later, but you can't take any out after you add it, due to entropy in action.