hi I'm Rick Martinez a food editor and recipe developer at Food Network I'm a Texan but my grandparents are actually from northern Mexico and today I'm going to make for you a couple of dishes that are both TexMex and Northern Mexican in origin rice and beans the first thing we're going to do is we're going to make beans and this is a very specific type of beans it's called fres voros that means drunk beans they're drunk because we're going to put a beer in them so the first thing that we're going to do is we're
going to soak our beans I have some dried pinto beans here this is definitely an occasion where you want to make these from dried you don't want to use a can I am not a huge fan of soaking beans I feel like when you soak beans um they absorb the water which is what you want them to do to reduce the uh cooking time when they absorb the water guess what they taste like water but this is one recipe that I am saying to soak your beans because I did try it with um without the
soaking time uh the issue is is that when you add the alcohol and you add the tomatoes which are acidic it slows down the cooking times so that's why I actually soaked them so I've got some boiling water I'm going to add this to my bowl right and to this I'm going to stir in 2 tablespoons of cooster salt so I'm giving this a little stir to dissolve the salt and I don't see any crystals in there so it's all dissolved now I'm going to add the beans now I am going to cook the bacon
so I'm going to cut this bacon into half in pieces I don't want to cut them too fine because they're going to shrink up once they get cooked and rendered all right so we're going to go medium heat about 6 to 8 minutes all we're really wanting to do is render some of the fat and crisp it up so I'm using thick cut smoked bacon I like thick cut bacon because it holds its shape I also like the smokiness that the uh the bacon adds but feel free to use whatever your favorite type of bacon
is so I'm going to chop an onion and I always start by taking the root end and the stem end off cutting it in half and then peeling the skin off and then to cut it I'm going to start at the stem end and I want probably a medium dice on this so I'm just going to cut straight through Palm down and then make the cross Cuts sharp knife works best make the claw and then just give this little end a little chop and that's done all right all right now I'm going to work on
the jalap so you can make this dish with green bell peppers or red bell peppers or pablano peppers I actually prefer the flavor of the jalapenos I'm going to take all the stems off and and then you want to just cut them in half all right take a regular teaspoon and you can just kind of trace the outside edge of the pepper with the spoon and you hear it breaking up the fibers and then you can just lift the seeds right out if there's any remaining seeds in there you can just give it a little
scrape and you have a completely clean and seated pepper if you like it spicy you can definitely keep the the seeds in there but with four jalapenos it is going to be really spicy and if a few seeds stay in it's not going to hurt anybody so the way that I like to chop these kind of flatten them out a little bit and then with the skin side up just make little thin strips I like to do it about a/4 inch but you know you can make them bigger or smaller depending on how you like
it and I'll do two halves and then show you how to make the cross cut okay then just gather them up line everybody up and then kind of hold them together make your little claw fist so you're not cutting your hand and so that the the uh the blade is resting against your knuckle and there's no chance of you cutting your finger and then just make the cross cut all right now we will do the garlic so I'm going to chop four cloves of garlic you can also microplan these also it's a slow cooking dish
so I'm not going to be bothered by larger pieces of garlic in the beans so give them a light crush and then take the skin off you can also give it a little whack with the back of your knife if you want to do that I'm going to take this little slightly Woody nubby off not entirely necessary but sometimes it can be a a little bit hard to digest all right and then the way that I do it is just slice the garlic kind of turn so you have a flat Edge so that you're not
potentially going to cut your finger and all right and then I'll just go crosswise and then just go over them until you get to the size that you want all right this bacon looks really good I'm going to take it out slotted spoon I want to leave all the bacon drippings in the pan I'm going to cook the vegetables in that so now I'm just going to transfer all the veg into the Bacon fat that is exactly the sound that you want to hear I want to get some color on the onions I want to
soften up the jalapenos all that bacon Fat's going to infuse with the vegetables and just give you amazing flavor so we're salting not only the beans but we are also pulling out some of the caramel flavors this is 4 teaspoon of kosher salt and then just move them around as the liquid comes out of the veg you'll be able to scrape up some of this brown bacon bits off the side of the pan you definitely want to pull those up that's all just delicious bacon flavor all right these look like they've gotten some nice color
they're just starting to get tender they're getting lightly golden I'm going to make a little well in the center and I'm going to add my tomatoes I'm using one can of fire roasted tomatoes and now we're just going to cook these down until the liquid evaporates it's not going to take that long a couple of minutes I love this it's the colors of Mexico in this pot that looks good almost all the liquid is evaporated all right so I'm going to add my beans I'm going to add 10 cups of water put in the bacon
and if there's any just little leftover Bacon fat in there you can just go ahead and scrape that into it's more flavor and then finally my Mexican logger so I'm going to bring this up to a boil I'll reduce it to a simmer and we'll let it cook uncovered for about 45 to 75 minutes and I realize that's a pretty big range but depending on the beans that you're using sometimes you'll buy a bag of beans and it might be really old it might have been sitting on the store shelf for a while those beans
are probably going to take a little bit longer even with the overnight soak so now I'm going to start the rice so the first thing I'm going to do is prep my veg for the rice I am using three carrots for this recipe and I'm using a y peeler to take the outside off you can see they just peel so nicely if you had larger carrots you might get away with just using one or two depending on how big they are all right so I'm going to take the ends off the carrots I'm going to
cut these into pieces you just want them basically into planks they don't have to be exact this is a fairly rustic dish but they should all be around the same side so just make sure that you're you get that at least and then just line everything up and just give it a chop all right all chopped now we're going to do the onion take the stem end off take the root end off cut it in half so I'm only going to use half of the onion for this recipe I will save the half for another
use and I showed you how I cut in the bean part of this episode so I'm just going to cut it the same way I did before all right so for this dish I'm going to to grate my garlic the rice is actually only going to cook for about 20 minutes so you can totally chop it but I feel like for something that's going to cook that quickly I would prefer it to be really finely grated so whenever you're grating garlic you don't want to crush them too much just so they hold their shape while
you grate them so you want a sharp microplane for this all right that's our garlic and then I'm going to go ahead and cut this I'm not going to chop this into the dish I'm actually just going to have this and then lay it on top so that's literally all you have to do and we'll save that for the end so now I'm going to toast my rice so I want a really really hot Skillet and long grain rice this is just Carolina rice so nothing's really going to happen for a little bit the rice
is going to heat up and as it does it will eventually start to toast but it's going to take a few minutes in total this step takes about 12 minutes so you're going to start to smell a little bit of of some toasting it's going to start to smell like the beginning of toasted bread so not quite to the point where the the toast is getting golden but just where you like M I'm smelling some some toasting star Arch cuz that's what's happening in this pan and I prefer tossing the rice in the pan it's
it's more efficient you're basically taking all the rice on the bottom and flipping it up over if you don't feel skilled enough to do that or you're scared about getting burned you can just toss it with a spoon but you don't have to go crazy you can just kind of flip it like that you will need a skillet that has a slightly flared Edge or it will not work once the pan gets really hot you really just want to start tossing it almost continually it's also a really good workout so you can see I'm getting
a little bit of color and then there's a few little kernels that are getting a little bit of a a golden color you really need to be tossing this constantly to make sure that you get an even Browning on all the rice it's going to get really hot and it's going to hold on to that heat so you need to be careful definitely don't touch it all right now we're starting to get some color and if you're your pan gets a little hot then you may want to grab a pot holder like I'm [Music] doing
and when your arm gets tired you can switch to the other arm and all right they're getting nicely evenly colored that looks really good I'm going to transfer that to the Bowl again just be really careful cuz that is super super hot so now we are going to cook our veg I'm actually using schaltz so Schmaltz is actually rendered chicken fat you do need some fat to sauté your veg you don't have to use that you could use lard if you wanted to do that you could use Bacon fat or you could even just use
olive oil or just vegetable oil all right I'm going to let that heat up before I put my veg in so we just want to round up all of our chopped vegetables and as with all my other vegetables and sautéing I like to season at this point to draw out the sugars and to draw out the liquid so I'm going to add 5 tpoon of kosher salt and you might think that's a lot and it's funny because if I put the liquid in at this point and you taste the liquid it would taste really really
salty and you would think oh my god I've over seasoned this but rice takes a lot of salt all right I just want a little bit of color on this I want the veg to get a little bit tender we don't need any of these vegetables to be completely cooked through they are going to get simmered in the broth for about 20 minutes this step is probably going to take about 6 to 8 minutes in cooking you'll often here people talk about layering of flavors and this is really a fundamental layer of flavor that that
people are referring to uh the sautéing of vegetables it not only softens them and pre Cooks them but by caramelizing them you're just adding a layer of flavor so you're going to hit that sweet note so if you just drop these vegetables in raw you're not going to get a lot of that Sugar you're just going to get raw onion and Raw carrot flavor by sautéing them you're going to get those caramel notes by to in your rice you're going to get that toasted nutty notes by adding the schmalz you're going to get the chicken
notes by adding more chicken stock at the end you're going to really develop that chicken flavor all right this is looking really good I want just to shade more color in there before I go to the next step okay so what I'm going to do is I'm going to clear a little space in the veg just move them over and then I'm going to add the tomato paste so I'm going to do this for a couple of reasons the first is tomato paste can take on a little bit of the flavors of the can or
the container that it came in and it also might have a slightly raw tomato flavor and again this is just another way of adding another layer another dimension of flavor so I just want to fry the tomato paste until it goes a little brick red and this is going to happen really quickly it's probably going to take about a minute we're looking pretty good so now I'm going to to add my chicken stock and if you have homemade definitely use it if you only have box that's fine if you don't have any then just use
water we've developed enough flavor in there that it'll be fine and then just give it a stir and if there's any little brown bits on the bottom you'll pick those up I'm going to crank that to high just so that it'll come to a boil quickly all right so this has come to a boil now I'm going to add my toasted rice be careful because this is still hot you can see as it hits the water it's actually continuing to heat the water it's really really super hot and then I'm going to reduce this to
low I'm going to sprinkle over my thawed formerly frozen peas and I'm going to drop in my Sedano halves and I'm going to cover this so the rice is going to cook for about 20 minutes until all the liquid has been absorbed by the rice and then you're going to let it sit covered off heat for 10 minutes just to make sure that everything is nice and tender all right the rice has been resting for about 10 minutes off heat so now look at that oh my God I think my aunt would be proud of
me this looks so good oh it smells really delicious but all the liquid has been evaporated the rice is absorbed everything it's really nice and fluffy and tender I'm going to keep it covered while I chop the cilantro I'm just going to give this a a rough chop I'm just going to add this directly to my beans and then I'm just going to stir them in and that fresh cilantro is going to really pick up the beans and and Elevate the flavor you feel free to do this however you want I like them not on
top of each other but definitely touching so this is just like home and this is exactly the way that I served it then some people like to put the beans on top of the rice I don't know I mean it's fine but this is the way I do it I think it's just prettier that way that that is a taste of home for me I'm gonna taste them separately just to make sure that I did both of them Justice right it's so good the rice is Fluffy but it's cooked through the sweetness that you get
from the the carrots and the peas a little bit of Tang from the tomato and then this really really gentle slow build Heat at the end from the Sano that was really good rice now my fre holis voros really really good the bacon is really nice the smokiness from the bacon and the Tomato really play well with the cilantro it's definitely just such a nice combo and it definitely screams cowboy beans to me this is a really delicious dish make the beans make the rice toast your rice this is really good it's really satisfying there
you go I've shown you how to make beans and rice and the next time you cook a Mexican meal these two dishes should be on that plate I hope you enjoy
