May 4th, 2009
Black Bean Soup
This soup was easy to prepare, healthy, and tasty – all the properties I love to have in my food. If you do a few things in advance, you can churn out a large amount of this soup pretty quickly and give yourself leftovers for weeks to come.
Like most of the recipes we’ll make, we substituted canned black beans for dried beans. Because the beans are so prominently featured in this recipe, I may use dried beans if I make it again, but the canned beans still produced a flavourful soup. To compensate for the pre-cooked beans, we cooked the soup base (garlic, onion, jalapeño, spices) a little less than specified, just until the onion had softened.
This recipe gets a lot of its flavour from the Rebarbeque sauce it uses. Rebar’s take on BBQ sauce takes under an hour to make, can be made in large batches, and stores up to 3 weeks in the refrigerator – a perfect recipe for summer. For the bottle of dark beer in the Rebarbeque sauce I used a porter that I helped make in my local beer brewing club. The BBQ sauce was dark, rich, and complex, and is definitely something I’ll make again – it was great on veggie burgers, chicken, and pork…pretty much anything. Those of you that are sensitive to spicy food should probably use half (or less) of the chipotle purée that’s called for.
This soup also gets a nice kick with the optional garnish of mango salsa, another Rebar recipe. We used a jalapeño instead of the serrano that’s called for, mostly because that’s what we’d picked up at the store, although the substitution would work well for anyone that can’t handle the heat of a serrano. As is true with most Rebar recipes, add the heat slowly and you’ll most likely find yourself stopping long before you reach the recommended amount.
A quick and easy soup is a great thing – all the satisfaction of digging into a hearty bowl of soup, but easy enough to prepare after coming home from work. Rebar’s Black Bean Soup is one such soup, and definitely one that I’ll have again.
