Recipe of the Month: Black bean pasties

Last night, Brian's Plan A for dinner—roll-your-own sushi—fell through when he discovered that the sushi-grade salmon at H-Mart no longer comes with wasabi and pickled ginger. (You could buy these condiments separately, but for something like four bucks apiece, which would have made our homemade sushi meal nearly as expensive as getting it in a restaurant.) So, left at loose ends, he started experimenting with the odds and ends we had in the pantry and fridge: a red onion, one soggy carrot, some celery, a can of black beans. And what he decided to make out of this motley assortment was...pies.

This recipe was, I think, inspired partly by a disappointing experience we'd had a month or so ago. We went out to a new Venezuelan restaurant that's just opened in town, where the menu centers on a sandwich-like dish called arepas. These are little flat patties made of cornmeal, cooked on a griddle like crumpets, and then split and stuffed with a variety of fillings, like shredded cooked chicken or pork. I ordered a black bean arepa, practically the only vegetarian option on the menu, and found it insanely bland. The arepa wrapper itself was actually pretty nice, sort of crispy, but the filling honestly tasted like the chef had just opened up a can of black beans, heated them up without adding any seasoning whatever, and stuffed them into the dough. I couldn't even finish it.

So I guess Brian had been toying in the back of his mind with the idea of what he would have done to make a more flavorful black bean filling, because he cooked up a mixture that swung way over to the other extreme. He chopped up the carrot, a stalk of celery, and a quarter of a red onion, sautéed them in a tablespoon of olive oil, dumped in the can of black beans liquid and all, and simmered it for ten minutes. Then he stirred in a whopping half a tablespoon of Penzey's Northwoods Seasoning, which we received a jar of as a stocking stuffer last Christmas, plus half a tablespoon of nutritional yeast, and continued to simmer the mixture until it was reduced to a refried-bean sort of consistency.

For the dough, he mixed up a sort of biscuit dough—a cup and a half of flour, a half teaspoon of salt, a teaspoon of baking powder, a tablespoon of olive oil, and about half a cup of water—and then, in his own words, "brutally mistreated it." Normally, you work biscuit dough as little as possible, so it comes out nice and light. But he kneaded this stuff as if it were bread dough for a good ten minutes, then broke it up into eight balls which he let sit for ten minutes and then rolled out into circles about seven inches in diameter. He topped four of these circles with the bean mixture, moistened the edges, added another circle on top, and then sealed, rolled, and crimped the edges to make little hand pies. He then baked these for 20 minutes in a 450° oven, using a silicone baking mat underneath so they wouldn't stick to the pan.

The result was...well, certainly not bland. In fact, I'd say it was a bit too well-seasoned. The Northwoods seasoning, made from salt, paprika, black pepper, thyme, rosemary, garlic, and chipotle, packs quite a punch, and the amount he'd added to the beans made the mixture rather fiery and extremely potent. The outer crust also posed a bit of a problem, because the heavily worked biscuit dough came out not just crisp but hard—so hard that I couldn't manage to cut mine with a table knife. I had to break pieces off the edge of the crust and eat my way through those before I could get to the filling. If I'd been able to distribute the spicy filling more evenly across the mass of crust, I think it would have tamed the heavy seasoning a bit.

So the bad news is, this recipe isn't really ideal in its present form. But the good news is, I don't think it would take that much tinkering to make it work. I knew the basic idea of seasoned black beans in a crust was a sound one, because I'd had had black bean empanadas before that were quite tasty, so I looked up empanadas in Mark Bittman and found that the main difference between his dough and Brian's is that he uses quite a bit more oil—six tablespoons instead of just one to a cup and a half of flour. (He also uses more baking powder, more salt, and a half-cup of cornmeal in addition to the wheat flour.) Making the dough this way, and kneading it for only a minute before forming it into balls, should give us a softer and chewier crust instead of the hard shell these pies had. Bittman also forms his empanadas by putting just a bit of filling in the middle of each dough circle, folding it in half, and crimping it closed. That would eliminate the heavy rolled edge we had on these. And finally, cutting the Northwoods seasoning from one and a half teaspoons down to one, or maybe even three-quarters, would make it much less fiery, but still flavorful.

All in all, I'm inclined to give these bean turnovers another try, but next time make them more like Bittman's bean empanadas. I think with a little tweaking, they could be a decent addition to our vegan dinner repertoire—and one that we'll almost always have the ingredients for on hand.