Bean Taco over the fire

We cooked Dr Rudy Aujla’s Black Bean Taco recipe from The Doctors Kitchen over the fire.

This is one of our favourite cook books, the recipes are healthy and it has lots of nutritional information. It also contains really useful tips on how long to soak and cook legumes and other foods.

There were a few lessons we learnt. Obviously cooking over over the fire is very different than on the hob.

Firstly, we needed to have the beans nearer to the fire, we were worried they would overcook, when in fact some were undercooked whereas others were overcooked.

Secondly you need to stir the the beans more compared to cooking on a hob. This is because a hob is designed to cook the whole pot whereas fire only really cooks the bottom of the pan. This meant the beans at the top were not cooked as much as the bottom.

Thirdly, beans will cook about 5-10 minutes faster, this is because the fire is hotter than a hob. We used the same bean vs water quantity as the book recommends, this worked completely fine.

Fourthly, cooking for such a long time we would recommend using wood and coals. Coals are better at keeping the tempreature consistent, they burn over a longer period of time.

We found cooking the onion and garlic really easy, this is the part we were most worried about. We were worried it would cook a lot faster than anticipated. In fact it was pretty much the same as the book explained.

If you have a tripod then we found hanging the pan over the fire 10 minutes before starting to cook the garlic and red onion gives the best result. If you are cooking directly on the fire then you can cook pretty much immediately but you need to make sure the fire is not too hot so as not to burn the onion or garlic. We find having a tripod gets the best results when cooking outdoors. You can control the temperature better.

We cooked with vegetable oil, cooking with olive oil can be hard on a fire as the oil burns a lot quicker. If you are still new to cooking on the fire, personally, I would use vegetable oil.

We made our own wraps on the fire to go with these tacos.

We doubled the recipe so it would feed 4.

Makes: 0 Prep: 0 hrs 20 mins plus soaking beans Cook: 1 hrs 0 mins

Ingredients

  • 4 tbsp vegetable or olive oil
  • 8 garlic cloves, finely chopped
  • 2 red onion, diced
  • 2 dried ancho chilli, soaked in 200 ml water for 10 mins then deseeded (we didn't use this in the recipe
  • 4 tbsp tomato paste
  • 4 ripe nectarines
  • 2 sweetcorn cob or 200g kernals of sweetcorn
  • 8 corn tortillas (we made wheat tortillas ober the firepit)
  • 2 ripe avocadoes
  • handful of coriander
  • 1 lime
  • salt and pepper

Method

  1. Soak the beans overnight
  2. Start the fire an hour and a half before starting to cook
  3. Add the coal 30 minutes before cooking
  4. Put the beans in a pot with the required amount of water. Refer to Dr Rupy Aujla's cookbook The Doctors Kitchen
  5. Cook the beans on the fire for 35-40 minutes, cook them close to the fire. Using the coals to keep the temperature consistent and wood to keep the fire hot.
  6. Stir the beans every 4-5 minutes so they are constantly rotating ensuring all beans cooked
  7. Whilst the beans are cooking you can prepare the vegetables, wraps and soak your chilli if you are using it.
  8. Brush oil on the nectarines and Corn on the Cob (if you are using) and grill on a griddle pan. We didn't do this, our 4 year old does not like the tase griddled sweetcorn or nectarines. Griddled food always tastes better on a fire.
  9. Once the corn on the cob is cooked, cut off the sweetcorn.
  10. Test the beans after 35 minutes and cook further if they are little crunchy. Once cooked leave them to one side.
  11. If you are making wraps now is a good time to get them cooked.
  12. Add your onion and garlic to your pan, cook for 1-2 minutes.
  13. If cooking outside use a pestle and mortar to mix your soaked chilli and tomato paste. Else whizz it up on your food processor.
  14. Add your Tomato Paste to the onion and garlic, cook for 1 minute. Continually stirring so the onion and garlic don't burn.
  15. Once cooked take it off the heat.
  16. Put your taco together, we prefer to put each ingredient on the plate. We found if our 4 year old is able to make his own taco he eats it.
  17. Any leftover beans you can eat with a jacket potato or rice.
comments powered by Disqus