I’m making New Orleans Red Beans and Rice for dinner tomorrow. I’ve got a ham-bone, and andouille sausage, and all the other proper things.
I was going to drop by a good Hispanic grocer to get a pound of small red beans, the kind I usually use for this dish, but at the last minute, before leaving work at the Food Coop, I asked the Bulk Guy whether I should just buy the organic red kidney beans we have available for sale.
“Will those work well? Or should I hunt down some small red beans?”
“Why not use the azuki beans?” he said.
Azukis are a bean grown in the Far East, usually used for red-bean ice cream and puddings and other sweet dessert dishes in Chinese and Japanese cuisine. I’ve never cooked with them before, although I’ve eaten them in restaurants. They’re smaller even than an Occidental small red bean, and have all sorts of folkloric health benefits – they’re considered a health food by some, more so than run-of-the-mill beans.
Opinions, please. I now own a pound of azukis, and will start soaking them tonight to ready them for my beanpot tomorrow afternoon. Will my beans be delicious, or will they suck?
I would think they would work out fine. The problem is, I associate azuki beans with those god damn Japanese food atrocities that use azuki beans and sugar. I seem to recall some nightmare of azuki beans and sugar on sno-cones and in ice cream. Freaks me out, I tell you. Omanju, a traditional Japanese confection from flour, rice powder, and buckwheat, with a red bean paste filling is the most beautiful dessert on the planet, but it has the taste and texture of the devil’s excrement.
Red beans and rice, however are delicious, so long as they are cooked New Orleans style and not Japanese style.
…ten hours of soaking, and these little boogers haven’t gotten a hell of a lot bigger.
Meanwhile, the bone’s been simmering in chicken stock along with onions, celery, carrot, scallions, parsley, garlic, poblano pepper, fresh thyme from the garden, bay leaves, a jalapeno, and some crushed red pepper. Smells good enough to skip the beans entirely.
Nahhhh…here they go. Plooop. NOW we’ll see if they grow any…
One test of how Americanized an Asian American is the “red bean test.” If they *like * the red adzuki bean in all it’s permutations such as on a snow cone, in a dessert soup, hidden inside a perfectly normal lookin baked bun, in a steamed bun or any other combination, then they rise up the asian scale-o-meter.
Most of us that didn’t grow up on the sweet adzuki beans in freaking every combination possible, usually find that much of it is, well, at least just not right if not downright disgusting.
fishbelly white WASP here, and I adore azuki beans … i make my own paste, and one of my absolute favorite things is the bean paste filled dumplings coated with sesame seeds … or a dollop od warm red bean paste on ice cream [diabetic so i cant do it very often ] and my favorite thing to do with my homemade bean paste is combine it with agar and make it into little candies buy oozing it into the candy molds and letting it set and then popping out little leaves, fishes and shells
Just thought I’d add, when I lived in New York, and I wanted to get some food for southern cooking, I’d always head to Harlem. I found out that the blacks there carried on eating the same as they did back down south. It’s funny though, in the deep south there isn’t a whole lot of difference in what blacks and whites eat.
As far as cajun stuff goes that’s difficult. But I wouldn’t be terribly surprised to see redbeans up in Harlem
First of all, the beans and rice were pretty good. Azukis stayed a little too small for a proper visual…the pot of beans looked more like a stew of beans with the other veggies than a pot of beans with flavorings added. But the flavor was lovely.
Second – the recipe is the Master Recipe for Red Beans and Rice from John Thorne’s finest book to date, 1996’s Serious Pig. There’s a link in post #5.
] and my favorite thing to do with my homemade bean paste is combine it with agar and make it into little candies buy oozing it into the candy molds and letting it set and then popping out little leaves, fishes and shells