Special Beans are a long game kind of dish. The game takes little active time, but you have to keep your eyes on the special prize if you want to win.
What makes these beans so special? Alison says it’s the use of dried beans. Yes, dried beans. I’d purchased dried beans only once before during the early pandemic grocery frenzy because all the canned beans were gone. That bag of black beans is still sitting in my grain basket, untouched.
There’s an entire essay and multiple recipes devoted to dried beans in Dining In, so I couldn’t avoid them forever. But I was hesitant. Dried beans demand a lot of forethought. These special beans needed 2 full days of soaking before they were ready for cooking. Dried beans also require commitment. There’s no sure way of telling if they’ll fully soften, so you have to soak and cook them, hoping for the best.
Where I live, dried beans other than black or pinto are hard to find. When I went on my sumac hunt, I came across a Middle Eastern market that carries 2lb. bags of dried large lima beans. So two days before I wanted to eat my special beans, I began soaking 1lb. of lima beans in cold water.
This being my first time around the dried bean block, I was mistaken about what would happen during this soaking period. I was under the impression that the beans would become totally softened to the point they resembled canned beans. So soft that you could eat them straight out of the bowl without cooking them. Instead, soaking just loosened the proteins in the beans, helping them expand to their true size. The beans were still rather hard and needed to be cooked for several hours before becoming edible.
This recipe is meant to make flavorful beans, and while they can be eaten on their own, they’re best used in something else (Alison suggests her Best Baked Beans or soup). By the time I finished cooking these beans, it was 7:15pm (again, long game), so I wasn’t about to whip up another recipe. I also didn’t have time to use them in something else the next day; I travelled to Cincinnati the next morning to see my BFF / designer of my website logo (thanks, Rachel!).
On cooking day, I began by heating the bacon in my Dutch oven with a good bit of olive oil. The key here is not to brown the bacon, but to heat it slowly so the fat has time to seep out. It’s the fat you’re really going for so it can infuse the beans with porky flavor. By this point, there should be a lot of oily fat at the bottom of the pot, enough to soak a bunch of tomatoes, shallots, and heads of garlic. (Here is another example of an Alison recipe that requires minimal chopping, if choppin ain’t your thang.) Add in some anchovies, a parmesan rind, fresh herbs, and water, and you’ve got a flavorful cooking liquid to soften your beans.
The beans spent a little over 3 hours on the stove before they were softened to my liking. I served them in their cooking liquid with homemade sourdough and herbed goat cheese. The cooking liquid doesn’t have a super strong flavor, so we added some more salt, and even a bit of lemon juice to liven it up.
I’ll make these beans again soon and plan to turn them into Alison’s Best Baked Beans. But next time, I’ll plan for an even longer long game. I bet it will be worth it.
9 recipes cooked, 216 recipes to go.
