Gourmet Vegetarian Slow Cooker - Lynn Alley [3]
The liquid left from cooking beans, when not served with them, is a bonus that can enliven soups and other dishes. Large white beans, for instance, leave lots of starch in their cooking broth, making the thick, gelatinous liquid almost perfect for thickening vegetable soups and stews.
Slow-cooked beans taste great, and the long, slow cook often yields an almost creamy product that absorbs the flavors of herbs, spices, fats, and aromatic vegetables added to the pot.
Dried beans should ideally be cooked and eaten within a year of harvest, but most of the time we as consumers have no idea about the condition of our beans. So here are a couple tips for buying beans.
Look for a store or source that has a rapid turnover of beans. They are more likely to be selling recently harvested beans than stores where the beans have been sitting on the shelf for eons.
The appearance of the beans can give you some clues as to how long they’ve been stored. Beans that are split, cracked, or chipped have probably been around for longer than we would like.
Remember that the condition and length of storage of the beans may affect cooking times. Occasionally, I will hear a cook complain about cooking beans for as long as 14 hours, only to find skins that still remain tough and inedible. “Fresh” dried beans will always cook within a reasonable amount of time.
OLIVE OIL
Some olive oil is suitable for cooking, while some is more suitable for what chefs call “finishing” a dish. The less expensive olive oils, usually found in large quantities at a grocery store, are often suitable for cooking purposes. You can use them to brown onions or sauté vegetables. But the more expensive extra virgin olive oils are best when not subjected to the high heat of cooking, and are instead drizzled over a dish or stirred in at the last minute.
SALT
Most of us grew up thinking that salt is salt, but there can be great variations in flavor, texture, and even color depending on where the salt came from, how it was formed, and what’s in it.
I rarely use conventional “table salt” in my cooking anymore (with the exception that I still use salt from a box for basic, large-scale cooking needs, such as soups and stews). This is because I have found that the “good” salt called for in my recipes has so much more to offer in terms of flavor and often texture than does good old Morton’s. A sprinkling of my favorite gray sea salt, for instance, is often all it takes to elevate a poached egg on toast to something very special.
For this reason, you will find my recipes call for “salt to taste” rather than specific amounts of salt. If you are using conventional table salt, for instance, you should know that it is considered to be twice as potent by volume as kosher or large-grained specialty salt. So let your taste be your guide when it comes to salting your creations.
Most specialty salts are large-grained and require some crushing before you can sprinkle them on your food. To this end, many stores sell special salt mills, which are like pepper mills, only designed for salt. Trouble is, many specialty salts are somewhat moist, and this moisture can gum up the works of a salt mill, even those made for specialty salts. So I have taken to grinding salt crystals by hand in a small Japanese suribachi (a sort of Japanese mortar with a ridged inner surface and wooden pestle) purchased at Sur La Table (www.surlatable.com). I have one for grinding salt and one for grinding other spices.
Sea Star Sea Salt is my delicious all-purpose standby. Sea Star (www.seastarseasalt.com) is owned by chef Holly Peterson, who teaches food and wine dynamics at the Culinary Institute of America in Napa Valley. Holly sources her salt from Brittany, where it is farmed in the traditional manner. I have a handmade ceramic seashell that sits on a shelf above my