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.

My guess, by the ingriedents, is that it tasted good. I imagine it tastes like savory pinto beans but if you want to try a more authentic recipe, search for Charro bean recipes.