Cool Beans: The Ultimate Guide to Cooking with the World’s Most Versatile Plant-Based Protein, with 125 Recipes by Joe Yonan | 2020 | Ten Speed Press | Hardcover $30
After being overlooked for too long in the culinary world, beans are emerging for what they truly are: a delicious, versatile, and environmentally friendly protein. In fact, with a little ingenuity, this nutritious and hearty staple is guaranteed to liven up your kitchen.
Joe Yonan, food editor of The Washington Post, provides a master base recipe for cooking any sort of bean in any sort of appliance, as well as creative recipes for using beans in daily life. Drawing on the culinary traditions of the Middle East, the Mediterranean, Africa, South America, Asia, and the American South, and with beautiful photography throughout, this book has recipes for everyone. With fresh flavors, vibrant spices, and clever techniques, Yonan shows how beans can make for thrilling dinners, lunches, breakfasts — and even desserts!
In January – February of this year, I decided to cook my way through Cool Beans. I didn’t try all of the recipes — there are SO MANY! — but I think I’ve made a good dent.
One of the reasons I wanted to read this book is that the author and I grew up in the same smallish city out in West Texas. I am now lucky enough to live in one of the biggest and most diverse cities in the country, with its correspondingly fantastic food scene. In the place + time where I grew up, our culinary options were a little more limited, but there was at least one type of food that town did PERFECTLY — Tex-Mex.
My hope for this book was that it would offer options for more veg-centered but still “authentic” Tex-Mex, and it does have a handful of recipes that more-or-less fit the bill. The refried beans used for the molletes recipe tasted exactly like the refried beans served at the little burrito shop where I used to have lunch in high school, and gave me that big dose of culinary nostalgia that I was craving (though molletes are firmly Mexican, not Tex-Mex).
However, Cool Beans is in no way all about Mexican or Tex-Mex food. It includes recipes from or inspired by a wide variety of global cuisines. You can try bean recipes from Cuba, Ecuador, India, Italy, Lebanon, and Nigeria, to name a few origins. I particularly enjoyed trying the marinated lima beans, the creamy pasta e fagioli, and the orange-scented black beans; all 3 of these will go in our regular recipe rotation.
The book also includes a pretty good guide to types of beans and cooking methods, plus some health-related info. If cooking beans is a new thing for you, you should definitely read this intro section.
If you would like to see a few photos from my adventure through this book, or if you want to follow along in my continued culinary experiments, please feel free to visit my foodie Instagram:
Links:
- Website of Joe Yonan
- Interview with Joe Yonan in Texas Monthly
- Articles by the author at The Washington Post
- Articles by the author at The Splendid Table
Publication information: Yonan, Joe. Cool beans: The ultimate guide to cooking with the world’s most versatile plant-based protein, with 125 recipes. Berkeley, California: Ten Speed Press, 2020. Hardcover.
Source: Personal library.
Disclaimer: I am not compensated, monetarily or otherwise, for reviews of books or other products.
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