dandelion (she/her)I made a recipe shared on lemmy: "smoky, brothy pinto beans"
PoojabberI hope this tasted great, but if I am being honest, the picture looks like aweful slop. Please tell me it was delicious so I can sleep happily.
It was pretty delicious, very similar to chili - but I personally felt it would have been better if it were expanded a bit more, maybe small, cubed potatoes to help add starch (I maybe rinsed my beans too much after cooking), or better yet is to lean into its chili profile and use diced tomatoes.
It was pretty tasty, though - despite the brown slop look.
To be honest, the recipe is not impressive and not helping my biased perspective that “all” vegan recipes are terrible (i.e. most vegan recipes create terrible tasting dishes) - it really do be like that. When I was a strict vegan, I usually would lookup non-vegan recipes and then learn techniques to adapt them to be vegan. That was usually more successful than starting with a vegan recipe.
I think the reason vegan recipes are so terrible might relate to how much overlap exists between vegan food culture and health food culture (like, going back at least over a century - e.g. checkout at the Grahamites of the 19th century), so there is kind of an inherent asceticism in vegan food culture on average, I find.
(Just to be fair, notable exceptions to vegan asceticism I know of include SauceStache and Bryant Terry, both of whom seem invested in making food that actually tastes good. Even if the generalization holds in my experience, it’s not really all vegan recipes.)
I had to add a lot of ingredients not in the recipe to make it suitably rich and tasty - like I added liquid smoke, some vegan Worcestershire sauce, white miso, mushroom seasoning powder, etc.
The Cure for Literally Everything | Vegetarianism
fujiwood
southsamuraiI’m not sure jumping through hoops to poorly replace pork would be as good as just leaving it out, but it’s a damn nice effort for those that want it :)
For me, if I’m doing pintos, the smoked paprika alone does everything I would use a pork product for except maybe the fats. Since I find using oils just as good as pork fats for this application, the only thing left is texture, and I’m fine with just the beans for that tbh.
Again though, that’s me going on a tangent about personal preferences, and the recipe and work behind it are fucking great :)
personally the texture and nutrition are major reasons to substitute pork with something like TVP.
I really hate the way TVP tastes generally, it has this chalky off taste that I don’t know how to get rid of. So this time, determined to eliminate that weird taste, I rinsed the TVP thoroughly in hot water, then boiled it in a separate pot with black pepper, no-steak better-than-bouillon, vegan Worcestershire sauce, etc. and then drained it again before putting it with the onions to fry it up a little bit.
The TVP dramatically increases the protein per serving, it would have been probably 10 g or less in a bowl / serving without the TVP, and then it wouldn’t have seemed like chili at all - just a thin bean soup. I try to aim to have around 20 g protein per 500 kcal meal, and it’s even more important when vegan to pay attention to the protein content.
The reason I want protein is mostly for energy and satisfaction reasons - I’m less hungry when I eat more protein, and I notice I have more energy, which is important for supporting healthy habits like exercise (besides generally making life easier, as fatigue makes getting your tasks and work done more of a drag).
Also, adding the TVP didn’t feel like too much of a hassle tbh - it was certainly easier to prep than cooking dry beans for hours, and having to do that prep a whole day in advance.
Fair enough :)
In all honesty, the folks I used to cook vegan for aren’t as big a part of my life as they used to be, so I’ve fallen out of the habit of directly supplementing protein since I eat meat to some degree or another a few times a week. I can do fine with a big ol pot o beans and some veggies the rest of the time. Since I don’t tend to miss the texture for the same reason, I didn’t even think about it being a big factor for anyone that would be using this recipe to begin with. That’s what I get for not thinking outside of myself lol.
For real though, it’s great that you put the extra effort in and posted it. Seems like a really solid recipe
I see a bay leaf but see no mention of it in the recipe…
I added plenty of things not in the recipe, but 2 bay leaves are explicitly listed in the recipe:
The Meal I Can’t Stop Making
I didn’t mean to sound disrespectful as much as joking.
This is what I see for reference.
fallaciousBasisScroll up to the ingredients FROM THE VIDEO?
You might see a little arrow to expand that section. Click it.
Literally just a few lines above where I screen shotted. Lol, I feel dumb and thank you.
Excellent.
oh I see what you mean - yeah, that was something I didn’t list in my ingredient breakdown - but I mentioned I left a lot out 😅
look at you being playful - thanks for the clarification 😊
Looks like a struggle meal.
A lot of Appalachians know that as soup beans. I like to crumble my cornbread up in it to soak up the soup (old-fashioned cornbread is necessary here as sweet cornbread clashes horribly with the beans&taters, and I do love me some sweet cornbread much to my family’s disgust lol). I prefer navy beans to pinto, but a mix is also just fine. Skillet fry some sliced potatoes until kinda but not seriously stuck on and that’s the meal of choice that I request when I go home.
Fun fact: it is served in the Senate office building cafeteria as “Senate bean soup” because a WV senator once upon a time wanted it for lunch every day and had the cafeteria start offering it. I got a good laugh (and a good lunch). Made me think it could be partly to blame for all the windbags in Congress. 🤣