This is my favorite bean recipe

Happy Thanksgiving!

Greetings from Read Max HQ and happy Thanksgiving! In the spirit of the most fuck-ass work-week of the year, today’s newsletter will be about: beans.

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Beans, and how to cook them

This newsletter is technically/officially about “the future” and “digital culture” but in practice it is about offloading intrusive thoughts and bodies of knowledge onto my readership. For Thanksgiving I am prepared to share with you some knowledge about the humble bean.

I have come about this knowledge because I cook beans very often, for the following reasons:

1. They taste good.

2. They are one of very few foods that all three members of my immediate household will eat. (The other two are “pasta” and “quesadillas.”)

3. They’re extremely versatile and leftovers keep well in the fridge or freezer.

4. They are ostensibly very healthy, though if I’m being honest they’re perhaps not as healthy as they could or should be by the time I am done with them. (See below.)

In some sense beans are quite easy to cook: put the dried beans in a pot with water and the flavoring agents of your choice and cook until done. If they’re fresh enough beans, this will take less than four hours; if you soak them for a few hours beforehand it will take closer to 90 minutes; if they’re older beans, it might take six hours without a soak.

I will admit that, despite this simplicity, my beans did not always taste good, and this made the practical reasons for consuming beans less appealing. But several years ago I read this excellent recipe for beans from Marlow and Sons’ Patch Troffer, by way of Carla Lalli Music, and it unlocked for me some secrets to good bean-cooking. It’s now the first thing I send anyone who is interested in the bean lifestyle. There’s a video of Carla (who is on Substack!) cooking the recipe here:

But I highly recommend reading the actual recipe, which takes the the form of an email from Troffer to Music accompanied by Music’s notes. When people ask me -- and they do! Often! Genuinely! -- for bean recipes, this is the recipe I send them, because “casual personal email with some notes” is, roughly, the right format for a bean recipe. There is not much (but not no) technique to cooking a good bean and no point in a fussy set of instructions. (As suggested above, the main technical instruction for beans is “simmer until done.”) They are a forgiving food--another reason to love them.

Indeed, you could make the Troffer-Music recipe precisely as written (and end up with excellent beans!), but just as good is to take it as a set of guidelines, suggestions, and a kind of overall vibe blueprint for future bean cooking.

Allow me, in the overall spirit of the recipe, to add my own notes. The main lesson to take from the Troffer-Music bean recipe is that the secret to good beans is same as the secret to good food of any kind anywhere: immense amounts of fat and salt. This is the kind of simple truth everyone claims to know, but I think people may fail to conceptualize just how much fat and salt is necessary for a transformative bean experience, and Troffer and Music communicate this well:

I confit a bunch of garlic and throw it all in with the confit oil. I like to have an inch or so fat cap on the top to keep the beans submerged. I'll add more salt here.

Carla’s Note: Don’t gloss over that part. “An inch or so” of fat should be sitting on the surface of your bean liquid. If you don’t have confit garlic, add whole peeled garlic cloves and lots of good olive oil. I keep random rendered fats in jars in my fridge, because I’m weird like that, and believe you could use schmaltz or ham fat if you wanted to make these not vegetarian.

I know that some people will insist you can make great beans without quite so much fat. This is, technically, true, but I recommend you keep “one-inch fat cap” in your mind as you cook, as a kind of north star--a reminder that however much fat you’ve added, you can probably add even more, and it will only improve the beans. (The advantage of an actual fat cap, by the way, is that the beans will cook more evenly than if they are bobbing up and down in and out of the water.)

(The fat you choose is up to you. These days I save bacon drippings more or less specifically to spoon dollops of rendered pork fat into my bean pots. If I don’t have any fats congealed in my fridge I’ll pour olive oil in. A lot of olive oil.)

A similar principle holds true for salt. Beans are like potatoes; they can take an astonishing amount of salt. You can over-salt beans, but it’s quite difficult to do so. (Ignore people who claim that salting beans too early, or throughout the process, slows cook times; with good fresh beans it’s not a problem.)

The second lesson is that, besides fat and salt, you can really put whatever you’d like in the pot--whatever you’ve got around; whatever’s in season; whatever you think will taste good:

I sometimes add an overripe tomato in the summer. I like savory with beans; I like mint with beans; oregano too. Salt. If I add herbs I do it repeatedly, so there are long-cooked herbs and freshly dropped herbs at the end. Salt.

Carla’s Note: The salt seems important, dig?

I like burnt lemon halves, salt.

Carla’s Note: No, I don’t generally have burned lemon halves on hand, either. If you want to emulate this, heat up a dry small skillet over medium-high heat, and cook two lemon halves, cut side down, until the surface is charred, 3–4 minutes, then add to the pot.

Don’t limit yourself to herbs and spices (though don’t skip them, either): My favorite bean-pot add-on is a Parmigiano or Pecorino rind. And, of course, if you’ve got time, you can cook down some diced aromatics in the pot before you add the beans and water--but you don’t need to! It’s your kitchen!

But that’s it--that’s really all you need to do: Fat, salt, herbs, spices, maybe some vegetables or an old cheese rind, cooked at a low simmer until done. A pound of dried beans cooked will get you around the equivalent of two cans of store-bought beans.

What you should do with your beans, once you’ve cooked them, is a separate matter, and may require more fussy recipes. But the beautiful thing about a pot of beans is that you can, and often should, simply eat them as is, in their own broth in a little bowl, maybe with some cooked greens and good olive oil or a salsa macha. (Troffer serves his with aioli and breadcrumbs.)

Put the leftovers in container in the fridge (retaining the bean broth!) and you will end up finding all kinds of excuses and accompaniments to eat them throughout the week: With a poached egg for breakfast; spooned on toast for lunch; cooked up with pasta for dinner. Refry them! Marinate them! Pizza beans!