Cooking Tasty Red Beans

If you've landed here, I know two things about you: First, you cook and are kitchen handy, and second, you are computer literate.

If you want to know how to cook red beans, have these handy:

• 12 inch cast iron skillet
• A low flame for your stove top, and
• Double up the height of burner's load bearers, borrowing a second one from another burner

So . . . . What makes great Red Beans?

Quickly browning out all the non-bean items before you add them to the pot. (If you cook red beans, you probably would also cook jambalaya, and same idea applies.)

For example, when I add sausage, I slice it, and then brown both sides lightly in a cast iron skillet. Onions, too, benefit from precooking -- I slice them in 1/4 inch rounds, with a single slice radially to the edge on each round. Each side browned.

The browning will:

• make the food an order of magnitude more tasty
• make the food look more interesting

• the Maillard reaction in the meats, a reaction between amino acids in the meats and sugars
• caramelization of sugars in the onions, the meats, and whatever else has sugars, whether natural to the food, or added by a processor.

  Don't overcook or excessively brown these items, as the sugar will burn, and add a scorched taste to the end-product).

This takes time, but it's worth it. But most of the time can be occupied doing other things in the kitchen, including preparation.

Add space between the heat source and the pot used to cook the beans, into which you will eventually add the beans and everything else.

On a gas stove, borrowing another flames cast-iron support, helps, although modern gas cooktops likely have low-BTU simmering settings. If your electric cooktop can not simmer at very low temperatures, adding a specially manufactured spacer will help.