"Emergency" Black Bean Tacos

okay this edition of Taco Tuesday is all about the emergency taco I mean what you need when you come into the house and you are starving you don't have very much in the refrigerator at all and you don't have much time or you're just going to pass out so I'm going to show you what my emergency taco is in that situation I always have a can of black beans in the refrigerator and probably by now you know that I'm a guy that will have some lard in the refrigerator fresh rendered pork lard you can use oil for this if you want it but it's not nearly as delicious as the one when you do lard okay so I'm going to put some lard into a pan here and turn the heat on to about a medium-high here because I want to get it going and then I've got a little bit of chopped garlic that's going to go in there once that lard is hot and then I'm just going to pour the black beans in there and that's going to be the base of my my taco here but we're going to garnish it with two different things one is going to be a salsa and the other is going to be some cheese okay so here's your choices I've thrown out some different ideas here the things that you might have in your refrigerator this is just crumbled goat cheese this is like a queso fresco or you could use a queso Anejo and when you're talking about that you could always go to Parmesan or Romano cheese this is a little bit of feta cheese so you could use that if you have it you want something that's going to pack some punch and that's why I've chosen three sort of high acid cheeses that are going to be really really flavorful okay arm lard is hot now so we'll put the garlic in there let that cook until it's just excuse me that until it's just labor for aromatic smells like garlic but not long enough for it to do any browning at all and then I pour my can of black beans in there and now I'm going to mash it and I'm going to mash it you can use like an old-fashioned potato masher I've got a kind of fancy old-fashioned potato masher here which I think works really well for this kind of a thing it's like it being masher that you'd find in Mexico and once I get it to a coarse puree which doesn't take much time I'm just going to let it simmer till it's thick enough and we'll talk about salsa here okay so let's let's leave that we'll come back to it in a minute and see where it is in terms of both consistency and thickness I like it to be a little coarse like I said okay now I want to talk about salsa I always have some kind of Mexican hot sauce in my refrigerator and you can easily use that and that's super fast and easy Valentina is one variety or one of the brands that you will see a lot in the Mexican grocery stores even in a well-stocked regular grocery store this is Tomasulo it happens to be my favorite of all of those some people prefer buffalo brand three of the most widely distributed of all of the mexican hot sauces but i usually have some tomatillos in my refrigerator and i usually have some kind of green chile today I'm going to do this with a jalapeno so for doing this really fast tomatillo salsa I'm going to roughly chop the jalapeno and put that in there seeds in all standard Mexican style you don't take the seeds and veins out because you're looking for it to give you that kind of heat now I've got tomatillos when you buy them of course they'll have the papery husk on them so take that off I'll cut those up into quarters which I've got right here and put those into the blender if you're a garlic lover you can just throw in raw garlic to this but I find it just overwhelms it so I take the one minute to put a couple cloves of garlic in the microwave covered with whale excuse me covered with water and turn it on one minute after that they will be sort of like blanched garlic and it takes all the bite out of the garlic I let that cool down and then put that into the blender jar here I'm going to give it a little salt turn on the blender oh one thing more if you have cilantro which I usually have in my refrigerator dude that will be no surprise to you I will put some of that into it and you'll notice here that the proportions on the ingredients are very flexible you make it to suit your own taste you like it really hot put another chili in there you're like it really garlicky go to 3 or 4 cloves of garlic sometimes I'm really in the mood for cilantro so I'll put a big handful of that in there and now I'm going to just make a kind of course puree out of this mixture as well that doesn't take very long at all and salsa is done okay it's not done completely for me but it's really good just like this and I think everybody that I know in Mexico makes this also like this as their sort of emergency salsa for me what I'm going to do is to make it a little bit more together in consistency by putting a little bit of avocado in it but you can skip this part of it if you want to with loads of people in Mexico certainly do that but I'm going to take about a half of an avocado here and scoop that into the blender and then blend that up and what will happen is it'll get mixed right in there and it'll make it into a kind of creamy salsa okay I'm gonna give it one pulse more and that'll do it okay so that's our kind of emergency salsa made a little bit more gourmet with the use of some avocado so this stuff is looking really good right now now I like when I'm making fast fried beans like this I like to make sure that I've added enough garlic to it to give it some kind of interest in flavor and again if you're using fresh rendered pork lard leftover bacon fat perhaps the fat that you've rendered out of chorizo sausage you will have even more flavor in this okay I'm going to set this to the side now and we're about ready to build our taco I'm going to give this a taste here now I made it pretty spicy with one large jalapeno so so good so fresh it's not only my emergency salsa it's one of my favorite salsas okay so let's take some tortillas put them on to a plate here sometimes I'm so hungry when I make these I don't even use a plate okay so lay those down there we'll take a spoonful or beans look at the consistency is just about right for me now so let's put a spoonful down and another spoonful I'm going to use this this feta cheese today just a little bit for all the way down here now go stop this creamy fresh tomatillo avocado salsa and then since we use cilantro in the salsa you'll have a little cilantro left over so you can just throw some leaves of cilantro over the top of it and I'll tell you an emergency taco never tasted so good

Channel: Rick Bayless

Views: 51,717

Rating: 4.9340205 out of 5

Keywords: Rick Bayless, tacos, black beans, emergency tacos, tortillas, lard, salsa, tomatillo salsa, avocado tomatillo salsa, avocados, Frontera Grill, Taco Tuesday, recipes, cooking, chef, dinner, meal planning, pantry

Id: khgWG-gTULU

Length: 9min 5sec (545 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 08 2016