Cumin Black Bean Soup

Chef Jerry Gruber Traditional Cumin Black Bean Soup So, we’re going to get started today. The first thing we’re going to do is we’re going to make some black bean soup. You can either take your beans and soak them overnight to get the gas out of them or you can just buy canned beans which is ten times as easy and you don’t have to wait 12 hours for your beans to be ready. So, these are just canned beans that I bought and we’re going to start off and were going to line them here. And these are the same beans but I messed some of these up a little bit because you want to have a little bit to have a couple of different textures. You want the real beans and then you want the bean texture. So, we’re going to cook it thoroughly and get it going. Now, we’re going to start our vegetables. Now, the first thing you always do is start out with some olive oil. This is my favorite oil because its the lowest in polyunsaturates and it’s actually the healthiest oil. Canola oil is good, too but it’s a nice oil. It has a nice taste to it and extra virgin just means if there's two olive trees growing next to each other, the first press, the first olives, he picked the green ones are the extra version and then the ones they let ripen a little more that sometimes turned brown or black or whatever. Those are your either just olive oil or virgin olive oil.. So, it’s good if you cook with it but it’s really best in salad dressings because it’s a real delicate flavor and once you cook it. You cannot tell it quite as much. So, we’re going to get our pan hot and we’re going to start with our vegetables. That’s always a joy when you get your pan hot first because if you put your vegetables in before you're oil is hot then you're of be steaming your vegetables and poaching them. And what you want to do is really sweat them until they kind of translucent to get the flavor out of them. Now, I’m to get some garlic in here, too. I’m going to show you a little trick with garlic. First of all, when you put your cutting board down in the kitchen always take a wet rag and put it underneath the cutting board. That way the cutting board can’t slip and you’re not going to cut yourself and you're not going to knock everything around. Make sure it’s secure and then with garlic. It’s so messy. If you put it in a little plastic bag like this and then you just take all your frustrations out on it and beat it up a little bit and all the papers stay in the bag and then you just go inside and then all the cloves are separated. So, you just take your clove out like this, taking everyone out. So, I try to find a couple of good ones. And just store it this way, just put it right back in your refrigerator or out if you want to keep it out. Now, this is to flatten the garlic so we’re going to press to flatten it down and then were just going to peel the garlic right off in the back. This peels off freely easily like that, same with this one. We’re just going to take it right, I’ll take the paper off them and get rid of the paper. Now, what I like to do is to take the flat of a knife just like this and just press it down all the garlic just like that, squashes it and then you just chop it up. It’s pretty simple. I can simmer the pans out. I could smell it. So, I’m going to add some, these are red onions. I like to use this for deli onions or Maui onions or any kind of a really sweet onion is nice. So, we’ll save this a little for garnish. We’re going to get started. I just want to get on working and this is just celery that I’ve chopped that much easily but I always do celery. I just do it like this. I take it and I cut it down in the middle line and then I cut a ribbon on each side like this and then I just chop it really fine just like that. It’s really important that your knife is really sharp. That’s the bottom line because it’s really easy to cut yourself with a dull knife because you have to press a lot harder. So, before you start you always kind of want to—maybe put a little edge on your knife get your steel out and make sure that it’s sharp. So now we’re going to add a little bit of celery to this. I guess maybe—this is four stalks here I put it all. Again its proportion that’s all that you like and with recipes don’t be afraid to experiment any time that you change two ingredients in one recipe, its yours you own it. It’s really hard to copyright a recipe because it’s easy to steal it. You just change a little something. So, our bean are boiling good and our vegetables are cooking and I want to cook this as high as we can get them really. We want to sweat them and we want to sweat them fast. Now, after you got your vegetables in you got a little base then you edge your garlic. Try not to edge your garlic first because what happens is you can burn the garlic and if you burn the garlic you never get the taste out. You can roast the garlic. It’s a really nice thing, too. So now we have the garlic, I put into that about two cloves. We’ll let this cook a little bit and what I have here. This is some lovely sausage. It’s a chicken sausage and it’s got some bright tomatoes in it and it’s got a little bit of a cheese in it and has a little bit of hogs on it which is just fabulous. It just changes the whole composure of the dish. So, we’re going to add a little bit of sausage to it and we’ll cook this up. This is cilantro and you just divide in the stalk just like this and try to chop it just took off a little off here and just chop it and I took a little bit right off. This is very simple with cilantro. It’s a key ingredient in this part of the soup because this is a Cumin soup and cilantro gives it a lot of flavor. Now you want to do this in layers, so that you put a little of your herbs in the beginning and then looses a lot so at the end then you have more cilantro to it. We want to keep stirring our beans so it won’t stick. They’re doing great. Now were no going to season till we get kind of near the end because we don’t know how much salt we’re going to need. We don’t know how much pepper we’re going to need. So now the next step in New Orleans they always say always to make the roux, so we’re going to put a little roux and what roux is it’s flour and butter, equal parts of each. So, just to save a little time, I made a little roux ahead of time. So, I’m going to add a little roux to this just a little bit. We now see what happens. Now, my vegetables are starting to get kind of translucent so that means they’re about halfway done which is good. What I’m going to do now you glaze the pan a little bit and to do glaze the pan I’m going to use a little bit of pork. I like to put wines in everything and liquors, the alcohol, all burns up so you can't get drunk but the flavor stays and they always adds a wonderful little hidden taste to everything. I put wine in it and then we’re going to cook it a little more. You could smell wine. It was part of the roux and it burns out the intense and gets a little ham to your taste. I think onions or just little bit of ham. This is just dice ham. I just had it because it’s going into my carbonara. I just stir it and thicken up a little bit. I think I had a little bit. This is organic free-range chicken broth, so I’m adding chicken stock to it and I'm going to see how this thickens up. Nice, a little bit more roux, now you kind of want to use it a whisk. You don’t want to need lumps in this soup ever so we’re going to make sure there’s no flour that’s hiding from us. Now this is coming great. Now, I think it might be a good idea to just have a little taste and see if our soup is done. It’s really good but definitely you’ll need a little pepper. Always used ground pepper if you can, get a pepper you know because then you don’t have the price it is. It has the pepper corns in it so it hasn’t been the shelf on the supermarket for three years and you know about how much you’re going to use because it’s really fresh. All the spices, a good tip. If your spices have been in your cabinet longer than six months throw them all over, throw them away and start all over again because they are no good. It lost all the potency. I mean they still taste a little bit but you have no idea how strong they are. This is Kosher salt. Kosher salt is a little coarser than your regular ionized salt. It’s a better product so if you find Kosher salt at the store, try some Kosher salt. We’ll taste it again, see how it’s doing. Oh God that’s going to be good. Now what I want to do here is incorporate the beans into the meat and broth. This whole thing here is causing me some Brussels, all these good of lot of things that you see, all these little dishes that you set up in France. It’s called the Misiam Blass. So, we’re put these two together now. I think I’ll move this to here, that’s so and then I’m going to dump this one now just like that. Oh this is going to be good. Okay, were getting really close now. Now you eat with your eyes first. First, you look at it and say, “Hmmm” either you like it. No matter how good is it but it doesn’t look good if you’re not going to try it. You are going to say, “I don’t think so.” So, you want to eat with your eyes first. So, your presentation is kind of important. So always try to find the proper bowl or dish or whatever. You want to use something that it looks a little nice. I have this real nice bowl here and what I’m going to do is make a pretty garnish so I’m going to take my lemon and I’m going to slice some nice, thin lemon slices just like this. Everybody has to get one so well then six. I’m going to do more just in case and then the last little bit of lemon, we’ll just put it in the soup. Cooking should be a liberating experience. It should be good and it should be fun too. It’s like a cosmic experience when you’re cooking. It’s an art form. It’s music. It’s art. It’s poetry. It’s all of them put together. I mean you can see pictures in the food because they had to look beautiful like a painting. So were going to make our little painting here and we’ll turn this down a little bit and it s kind of high and its just going to simmer now. You know if you cooked this all day or the next day it’s going to be twice as good. And with the soup what happens is all the flavors marry with each other and they all come together so soup isn’t soup. They’re always better the next day that hopefully it’s going to be good today, just a little more seasoning and we’ll be done. Then turn, a little bit of Worcestershire sauce, just enough salt disguises this a little bit, a little bit of the old standby, Tabasco. It’s a Cumin soup so you have to put Tabasco in it. And we’re going to put just a little bit of soy sauce, put the sauce. Stir the soup and now. It should be with a big ladle, how about this one? Now, your vegetables are still nice and crunchy. So, it’s like you’re always been in a nice clean plate. Now, cilantro lets garnish a little bit. Let’s make it really look pretty. Let’s get some cilantro like this. A little more cilantro in the soup and what I’m going to do now is just take this lovely lemon slices and float a couple in there. This is just hard boiled eggs, so I'm going to take some nice chopped hard boiled eggs and put this right on top of these lemon slice and float them in the water, in the soup just like that. And then we’re going to have either purple onions or green onions or whatever kind of onions but they always the usual the onions in this Cumin cooking. So, I put a little green and a little purple for color and just a little bit for color on this. This is a party on a plate. That’s what we’re doing right now. We have our herbs. We have our egg, we have our onion. We have our lemon slice and we have authentic Cumin black bean soup.