Then I agree. Why bother when taste isn’t important?
Well now I’m totally confused. What is the world coming to? :smack:
Anyway, I must be using a lower temperature because they do still take a few hours the way I cook them - on the stove top with the burner on the lowest setting. And they come out just fine for my tastes.
At least the salting issue is something I’m aware of. I have no idea where the idea that salt toughens beans came from. I’m hard-pressed to even imagine just what tough beans are.
Try to cook old beans and you’ll learn!
Beat me to it. I’ve had that happen to me at a Super Bowl party a few years back. We cooked those damned things for something like 12 hours and they would not soften at all. Leathery. Inedible. And, from my recollection, we even soaked them overnight. Luckily, about four or five hours in, with no sign of them softening at all, I made the executive decision to make a run to the local Hyvee (we were in Iowa) to buy a few cans of beans and disaster was averted. The extra eight or so hours of cooking (spread over two days) was to see if they would break down at all, and they did not.
Pressure cooker - from dried to refried in well under an hour, unless your beans are truly ancient.
Seriously though, try milk. I use it when making refried beans from scratch, and it adds a wonderfully velvety richness.
Stuck in the nutritional 80’s are we?
I’ve gotten along well with Rosarita brand.
Oops. I always have my sound off, so I didn’t notice.:o
The beans are super yummy. Definitely a step up from the canned.
No… more of a Northern Mexican thing, like flour tortillas and whole pintos cooked charro style.
That’s the thing- Mexican cuisine is a lot more varied than people give it credit for. A lot of southern Mexico eats black beans, and they start eating more pintos/pink beans the farther north you go, with the center eating both. Frijoles refritos are more of a special-occasion food than everyday brothy beans.
Tex Mex derives from northern Mexican cooking, adapted for American ingredients (not so different than American-Italian stuff in that sense), so it’s not surprising that things like pinto beans, whole or refried would be common.
It wouldn’t be any less authentic though for an “authentic” or “traditional” Mexican restaurant to serve whole or refried black beans as it would for whole or refried pintos. Similarly, something like a carne asada is just as authentic as cochinita pibil or squash flower tamales.
Tried adding a bit of olive oil this morning, and it worked great – the beans were nice and smooth, and the taste was improved as well. Thanks for all the ideas!
Thanks, Bump.
Nothing to add except now I’m in the mood to pick up some canned pintos and do my own for little burros tonight. When I do it if I don’t have bacon fat I’ll use Crisco. It’s gotta be a solid fat not a liquid one.
Trader Joe’s refried beans are tastier than a lot of store brands, which tend to taste too sweet to me. I’ve known people who add beer to them to make them more liquid. I like to add vinegar.
Where did you come up with this information? In the first place, boiled beans or what we call frijoles de la olla are commonly found on our tables throughout the country. And there are many different bean varieties to choose from wherever you happen to be here. And frijoles refritos are absolutely not a special occasion food. They are eaten everyday and almost at every meal in many Mexican homes.
Has it anything to do with income? My spouse often visited a well to do family when she was in her teens, and I understand never ate refried beans. Large amounts of beans cooked with large amounts of pork, and whole garlic cloves, but not refried.
Limes with everything, supposedly. 
Well, I was paraphrasing a Rick Bayless cookbook for most of that, and I think he might have been talking about traditional foods, not necessarily availability.
And what’s untrue other than the refried beans aren’t special occasion food? Are black beans traditional in Northern Mexico? Are they more tradtional in say… Yucatan?
I wasn’t trying to say that beans aren’t common, but rather that Tex-Mex tends to derive from northern Mexican cooking, and as a result has stuff like pinto beans and flour tortillas which aren’t as traditionally common in other parts of Mexico, and that a “traditional” Mexican restaurant might serve black beans or pintos, refried or boiled and be equally authentic.
I had refried black beans a few months back and I’ve been on a kick with them ever since. So good.
Like others I add a bit of milk.
That presupposes you already have the beans around. They’re super easy to make, as long as you’ve already made beans.
Hey, would you mind letting everyone know how much rice you eat? Go to a Mexican or a Tex-Mex restaurant anywhere in the world (except Mexico) and they try to fill you up on beans, yellow cheese, and rice.
I’m not sure what pink beans are; I’d call Peruanos white beans, and they seem to be predominant in Guanajuato which is pretty central.
The thing about refried beans isn’t that they’re special or not special. They start out as brothy beans, a big pot of them. Tomorrow they’re less brothy. In a couple of days add some oil, and continue to heat them up and serve them until they’re gone. Refried beans are the result of the practical use of a big batch of beans.
We’ve imported refried beans as a false friend. They’re not really re-fried; in Spanish the meaning is more like well fried.
Pink beans are a somewhat smaller, rounder and less speckled variety of bean which is pretty much interchangeable with pinto beans. Cooked, I doubt anyone can probably tell the difference.
Every peruano bean I’ve seen is a yellowish/khaki color. North of the border, white beans typically means either Great Northern, Navy, or possibly cannelloni beans, all of which are very white, and not really yellowish. Peruanos are probably my favorite bean though.
And yeah, I know that *refrito * doesn’t actually mean “re-fried”, but it’s the term used in English to describe that particular bean dish.