Cool Beans: The Ultimate Guide to Cooking with the World's Most Versatile Plant-Based Protein, with 125 Recipes [A Cookbook]

“ Cool Beans . . .xa0has been, by far, the cookbook I’ve cooked out of most this year. The book’s premise is a simple one: this food you thought was just ok, is actually really delicious, and really easy to make delicious in more ways than you likely thought possible.” —Daniel Modlin, The Daily Beast “Joe Yonan’s obsession with the humble bean is a fascinating read. Creativity, passion, and knowledge are visible in every dish. From black chickpea hummus to red bean ice cream, each recipe is both surprising and completely achievable.” —Yotam Ottolenghi, author of Jerusalem and Ottolenghixa0Simple “Where I come from in northern Spain, beans play a starring role in many of our dishes, so I am happy to see that Joe has cast beans as the lead in this book, showing us that they are capable of doing so much! Joe has always been a big thinker when it comes to eating better—both for our bodies and for our planet—and this book is a blueprint for reducing our meatxa0consumption in a thoughtful and delicious way.” —José Andrés, chef and humanitarian “Joe Yonan’s delectable Cool Beans is a collection of more than 100 very enticing recipes, all properly attributed to the source of inspiration. Aside from the recipes, there’s a great deal to learn in Cool Beans . This book should earn a place of honor in anyone’s kitchen. I know that it will in mine.” —Deborah Madison, author of Vegetable Literacy “Joe Yonan has created the most fascinating and unexpected adventure into the world of beans. The best part is that you want to try every recipe, because he makes them easy, accessible, and irresistible. His knowledge, kindness, and sense of humor is such delightful company on every page. Asxa0you cook your way from soups to desserts, he also manages to open a window into fabulous cuisines around thexa0world. He connects us allxa0through an ingredient he loves.xa0So excited and grateful for this book!” —Pati Jinich, star of Pati’s Mexican Table “From the very first recipe in Cool Beans , you know you are in good hands. Joe Yonan’s collection of bean-based indulgences is hip without being pretentious, easy without being simple, and just plain inspiring, no matter how you eat.xa0This book is a beautiful celebration of beans. It belongs inxa0every kitchen.” —Steve Sando, founder of Rancho Gordo Joe Yonan is the two-time James Beard Award-winning food and dining editor of The Washington Post. He is the author of Eat Your Vegetables , which was named among the best cookbooks of 2013 by The Atlantic, The Boston Globe , and NPR's Here and Now , and Serve Yourself , which Serious Eats , David Lebovitz, and the San Francisco Chronicle named to their best-of-the-year lists. Joe was a food writer and travel section editor at The Boston Globe before moving to Washington in 2006 to edit the Post' s food section. He writes the Post' s "Weeknight Vegetarian" column and for five years wrote the "Cooking for One" column, both of which have won honors from the Association of Food Journalists. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Introduction“We’re just here for the beans.” That’s what we told the waiter at Maximo Bistrot in Mexico City, where my husband, Carl, and I were honeymooning. We had considered a handful of destinations, but CDMX was at the top of our list for several reasons: we had scored cheap nonstop flights from Washington, DC; Carl had never been and I was eager to show him just what he had been missing; and what he had been missing, more than anything else, was the food. For me, the appeal goes even deeper: Mexico City is not just the capital of our vibrant, fascinating neighbor to the south. It’s the seat of a culinary culture ruled by three kings: corn, chiles, and beans. And as a longtime vegetarian who reveres beans as the most important plant-based protein in the world and as someone who grew up in West Texas, immersed in Mexican-American culture, I consider Mexico the bean-all and end-all. Every Mexican chef I’ve ever met has waxed poetic about them: scoops of frijoles borrachos (drunken beans) nestled in fresh corn tortillas; complex stews made from slowly cooked black beans, fresh and dried chiles and the pungent herb epazote; and smoke-kissed purees slathered on fried masa boats, topped with lime-dressed greens. It’s one of the many reasons I’ve always felt at home there. This time, I knew that on and among our visits to the floating gardens of Xochimilco, Frida Kahlo’s and Diego Rivera’s homes and museums, street food tours, art galleries, and markets, I would be on a mission to taste as many bean dishes as I could find. And in my research, one chef emerged as the bean whisperer: Maximo owner Eduardo “Lalo” Garcia. I had heard that he was passionate, with a fascinating background, and that he served a spectacular bean soup at his tasting-menu restaurant. We got to Maximo an hour before our reservation, just so we could talk to Garcia about beans, which, no surprise, are one of his favorite subjects. In addition to his history lessons about them, Mexican cooking, and the impact of NAFTA on his country’s culture, he described his “very, very old-fashioned” soup, made with beans he gets from the state of Hidalgo. They’re called cacahuate, because they resemble peanuts when raw, but . . . he was fresh out. Out? I’m sorry, what? We had come all that way to see the master of beans in the world capital of beans only to be told . . . no dice, no beans. A young Los Angeles chef had visited just a day or two earlier, Garcia explained, and he had sent her home with the rest of his stash. I had a hunch: “Was it Jessica Koslow from Sqirl?” He nodded, laughed that I would, of course, know all the other American bean obsessives, and then, when he saw my face fall and recognized the depth of my disappointment, he turned serious. He started scrolling through his phone, I assumed checking emails, texts, or calendar reminders. Good news: He was scheduled for another bean delivery that weekend. He hadn’t planned it, but he’d make the soup for us—that is, as long as we would still be in town and could return. We would, we could, and we did. A few days later, as we sat down for lunch—the only customers in the place getting just the bean soup rather than the multi-course tasting menu—the anticipation started nagging at me. How good could these beans actually be? The waiter brought us two big bowls of soup: the beans were super-creamy and golden in color, fatter than pintos, with a broth that was so layered and deep and, well, beany, that it made me swoon. It seemed so simple—just beans and broth and pico de gallo—that I could hardly believe how much flavor I was tasting. My husband, still recovering from a bout of Montezuma’s Revenge, seemed to come back to life before my very eyes. We tore into a basket of blue corn tostadas, and I slugged a Minerva beer in between spoonfuls of the soup. We left happy and restored.Such is the power of the humble bowl of beans.As a category of food, beans are old, ancient even. Forward- thinking cooks have been talking about ancient grains for years now—my friend Maria Speck helped popularize the idea in her book Ancient Grains for Modern Meals —but some beans are just as old as grains. According to Ken Albala’s masterful 2007 book Beans:xa0A History , among the first plants domesticated, some 10,000 years ago, were einkorn wheat, emmer, barley—and lentils. Lentils are so old that people who say lentils are shaped like lenses have got it backward; the world’s first lenses got their name because they were shaped like lentils. That’s old. In fact, there’s evidence that thousands of years before they were domesticated, in 11,000 BC, people in Greece were cooking wild lentils. Pythagoras talked about fava beans, Hippocrates about lupinis, and one particularly famous orator is even more deeply connected to chickpeas: His family took its name (Cicero) from the legume’s genus ( Cicer ). Ancient Indian rituals and early Sanskrit literature feature mung beans. In the New World, the remains of beans were found in a Peruvian Andean cave dated to 6000 BC. Mentions of black beans show up in the writings of ancient Mayans. A little younger is the soybean, but it has made up for lost ground by becoming, as Albala writes, “the most widely grown bean on the planet, the darling of the food industries and genetically one of the most extensively modified of all plants.” So why do beans have, well, something of a fusty reputation, especially here in the West? I think a couple of things are going on: first, there’s the unavoidable association with hippies, the memories of three-bean chilis stirred by pot-smoking countercultural types. But perhaps more importantly, beans worldwide have almost always been associated with poverty. (An exception is India, where the prominence of vegetarian eating ensures that beans have been appreciated by the highest castes.) America, as a relatively young country built on grand ambitions and looking for inspiration, perhaps has historically paid more attention to the cooking of the world’s elite and less to the cooking of the more resourceful lower classes. That’s been changing, thankfully. As immigrants continue to shape American cuisine and we pay more attention to our own native traditions, we’ve started to realize just how deep the roots of bean cookery go. Read more