Vilda Gonzalez is a chef, recipe developer, and creative. Her work takes many forms, from cooking private dinners, to feeding big groups on retreat, developing recipes for brands, teaching cooking classes, and advocating for more sustainable local food systems, but the through line is constant: she believes that food should be delicious, flavorful, and indulgent, while also being deeply nourishing, sourced with integrity, and inherently healthful. Her mission is to rewire our collective relationship to what eating well truly means, through the lens of seasonality, sensuality, and intuitive home cooking.
The beauty of cooking beans from scratch is that you’re left with two equally valuable end products: the tender beans themselves, but also the flavor packed broth that they’re cooked in. In celebration of Earth Month, we’ve set our intentions on making the best use of all our ingredients, read: making delicious, nutritious meals out of what would otherwise be cast aside. These beans, served in their inky broth, are a perfect example.
When cooking beans from scratch there’s a few fundamental tenets we swear by. First, soak your beans whenever possible. This provides for a quicker cooking time and helps to make the beans more easily digestible. We like to soak and cook our beans with kombu, a mineral rich seaweed celebrated for its ability to make a pot of beans even easier on the gut. We never skimp on a generous glug of olive oil and a heavy hand of salt added before the beans cook - this step ensures that both the beans and broth will be fully seasoned. The aromatics are flexible and can vary based on the bean you're cooking. For this particular pot, we lean on a richer, smokier flavor profile. Lastly, never underestimate the importance of a small but mighty splash of high-quality vinegar added to the pot once the beans have been taken off of the heat - this added dose of brightness helps to coax all of the flavors into balance.
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Re-create this recipe and find our SIMPLi products at a store near you! For more information and other methods on how to prep our beans & grains, check out our thorough cooking guides.
