Food Coloring Matters: Black Beans Cooked Purple
5 Oct
The Food Matters Cookbook is really kind of a hoot. Take as an example this deep purple dish of black beans flavored and colored with grated beets, red cabbage and red onions. The result is a hearty stew that’s delicious and striking in presentation. Click ‘more’ to continue.
The recipe in FMC starts with browning some sausage and then adding the red onions, some garlic and sage and cooking until the onions are soft. Then you add a pound of grated beets and half a head of shredded red cabbage and continue cooking until everything is deeply colored and softened. Then you add dried black beans, and water to cover by about 2 inches. Simmer this for anywhere from 45 minutes to two hours, until the beans are cooked.
I made a few adjustments here: I had cooked beans on hand that I’d flavored with a ham hock, so I figured I could skip the sausage, as the beans were already plenty meaty. Maybe the beans would have been more deeply colored if they cooked the whole time in this purple mixture, but my method shaved off a ton of time and was still plenty purple.
Either way, serve it, as Bittman suggests, with a spoonful of mustard. It rounds out the dish and lends a nice zing to this sweet bean stew. I served it with the Grains and Mushrooms, Lightly Scrambled and some adorable mini bell peppers that I got at the Greenmarket from Van Houten Farms, blistered in some hot oil with salt, pepper and lemon juice.
I will definitely be making the variation, Red Beans Cooked Orange (butternut squash or pumpkin instead of beets) for Thanksgiving!
