Directions: |
Directions:1. To precook the beans, bring about 2 quarts of water to a boil, drop in the pintos and bring back to a boil, uncovered. Boil to exactly 2 minutes, remove the pan from the heat, cover it, and let stand for 1 hour. At that point, the pintos can be cooked immediately or left to wait. Lift the pintos out of their soaking liquid with a slotted spoon to cook in fresh water, for no amount of cleaning and picking over quite removes all the grit that accompanies dried beans.
2. When you are ready to cook them, put the beans and all the remaining ingredients in a pot, cover with 2 inches of water and bring to a boil. Cover the pot and allow the beans to boil for as long as it takes until they are cooked through and tender. This can take as long as 4 to 6 hours, but altitude and the age of the beans make any exact time hard to estimate. After 2 hours, the pintos are usually cooked insofar as their proteins no longer taste raw, but it takes at least another hour before they are soft enough to mash well the next day.
3. Although a pot of pintos is as easy a dish as one could imagine, there are a few things to look out for. If foam appears when the beans are brought to the boil, skim it off and leave the lid of the pot slightly ajar to avoid any danger of boiling over. Stir the cooking beans up once every hour and add extra water as needed, keeping it level with the pintos as they near completion.
4. Putting salt in at the beginning of the cooking time is said by some cooks to toughen the beans but the other hand it raises the temperature of the boiling water---a necessity at high altitudes. If a pot of beans seems very stubborn about not getting tender, do not raise the heat to a furious boil--this will only expel water from the inside of the beans--and do not mash, blenderize or process the beans hoping that the raw taste will go away: it won't. Only long, patient cooking produces what you want: a pinto that is soft inside with a tender skin and milky, slightly thickened cooking liquid.
5. Assuming that you are making refritos on the second day (nothing is stopping you from refrying them immediately if you want), you will be eating the pintos whole in their pot liquor the first time around. You can of course simply spoon them onto a plate, but usually a thickened liquid is appreciated. You arrive at this by mashing or pureeing some of the beans. The easiest way is to ladle out half a cup of beans along with the same smount of liquid, puree them in a processor or blender and stir them back into the pot. Some cooks go so far as to mash almost all the beans at this point, using a potato masher or a slotted spoon. |
This recipe for Pinto Beans (Frijoles de olla) is from