Beans & Dodo (Fried Plantain) – Recipe Exchange Collab with Africa Everyday

This is a recipe exchange with my friend Babatunde from Africa Everyday – a really simple dish of spicy beans and fried plantain. Surprisingly tasty and hearty, considering it is made with so few, and simple ingredients.

Please check out Babatunde’s original video of this recipe here: https://youtu.be/qtglku9l1Fk

today we’re going to be making a really simple bean recipe which is a collaboration with my friend babatunde in nigeria so we’re going to be making nigerian spicy beans with fried plantains [Music] so this is a recipe that’s really really simple but it looks quite comforting and hearty and if you want to see the original of this please follow this card or the link in the description to have a look at babatunde’s video and please do support his growing and really interesting channel i’m making about half of what babatunde made and i couldn’t get the exact same beans that he’s got so i’m using these which are rose cocoa beans i presume that’s how you pronounce it which i got from the international food store in portswood now it’s interesting that babatunde didn’t soak the beans before cooking but i think the beans we get here are a lot drier than the beans he buys there fresh at the market they are dried beans but they’re not as dry i think as the ones that have been packaged for so in the uk so i’ve soaked these overnight and they’ve kind of doubled in volume i did also sift through them for debris and stones and dirt and so on i very very rarely find foreign bodies in bags of packaged beans or rice or grains it just generally doesn’t happen i have heard of people finding stones in these and i think i probably have found one little pebble in a bag of beans once in my life but i did sift through them anyway before i put them in the water so these have been soaked overnight we’re going to cook these just in water to start with and then add the seasonings and flavorings once the beans have started to soften so just going to drain these [Music] and i did rinse them a couple of times last night before putting them into soak and you can see from the footage last night that again there wasn’t very much dirt to come off of them and that’s because the packaging process involves blowing them with air to get all the dirt and debris off of them and any adhering dust and so on it’s possible i suppose for dirt and stones and things to make their way through that process it’s not unheard of but it is quite rare anyway these have been washed and i’m just going to give them another rinse now enough water to just cover them for now i may add some more liquid later and we’ll get that on to boil just going to add a few things that weren’t in babatunde’s recipe but i’m sure he will approve of which is a bay leaf some fresh thyme from the garden this is turkish time i’ve got growing in my garden it’s lovely just the leaves not the twig and this which is winter savory which is sometimes known as bean herb it’s a herb in the same family as rosemary and thyme and mint but is especially suited so many people say for combining with beans those are going to go in to infuse their flavors into the beans lid on and we just wait for that to come to the boil now the beans are going to need some flavoring added at various points but the first thing we need to have ready is onion so i’m just going to roughly chop this red onion here and now that those beans have been bubbling away for a few minutes onion goes in with them we’ll just have a little bit more liquid because it’s not covering them meanwhile we’re going to prepare the other flavourings so i’ve got some nice tomatoes and i don’t have a grinding stone like we saw babatunde use in his video but i do have a food processor so i’m going to use that got some scotch bonnet peppers here they’re a little bit old and wrinkly so i may i’m just going to open them up and make sure the seeds haven’t gone black inside and i might just remove a few of those seeds and pith and i think we’ll probably have four scotch bonnets in that batch of beans i think babatunde would probably put more than that in there but four seems like enough for that little batch for me it was only two cups of beans now what the heck let’s go for five again see that’s what i’m looking for the the core of the pepper there has started to go a little bit black so i’m just going to lose that bit off the end there sure it’s no problem really but it’s just it’s their takes so there we go we’ve got peppers tomato and we’re gonna have another onion okay all of that into the food processor and we’ll blend it down to a very fine paste that probably will create a pepper spray type of situation and you’ll probably hear me coughing in a minute all right and that looks pretty good now if you don’t like hot peppers i guess you could substitute i guess you could substitute some sweet capsicums or some smoked paprika or something like that or just more tomatoes these beans have had about an hour now of boiling and they’re still not soft enough let’s just have a look at one yeah i mean they are softening but that’s nowhere near soft enough all right i think i think we’re there so yeah quite squishy now so that’s been about an hour and a half of total cooking time i’m gonna take that bay leaf out now because it’s done its job and i don’t need it in there anymore so i think this is definitely something i would choose to do in the slow cooker in future just because i can leave it there all day and have the beans in the evening so that’s my tomatoes and peppers and onion paste in there we’re going to have a little bit more water and cook that for another half hour probably just to cook those vegetables and to infuse some of their flavors into the beans and i’m also now going to crumble in my stock cube probably won’t add any additional salt because there’s quite a bit of salt in that stock cube okay i took my eye off this for just a moment too long and it did start to catch on the bottom of the pan so i’ve transferred it into a smaller pan which makes it more manageable but also just so i didn’t have that burnt caramelized layer on the bottom of the pan to cook into these beans so i think i rescued it in time a moment or two later and i think it would have been too far gone but we still need to cook this for a bit longer while we carry on and fry the plantains the beans are actually quite soft and most of them are starting to fall apart on their own now so i think we’re getting there time for the palm oil now palm oil’s got a really bad reputation and rightly so this is not something i’m going to use a lot of in my cooking just because well in fact i contacted the company i bought this jar for a earlier collaboration with babatunde and i did actually write to these guys and ask them if their palm oil was from sustainable sources they didn’t respond to me and i think we have to assume that that means no i’m gonna put a bit more in there just so i can definitely taste it yeah it’s got quite a strong aroma it’s similar i suppose similar sort of weird fruitiness that olive oil has but it is very different to that and then we’re just going to let that cook away for another 20 minutes or so while we prepare the plantains so my plantain slightly less ripe than the one we saw babatunde using but i think it will be okay i’m probably not going to try the whole slicing along it and opening it out trick it is quite a lot more crisp the skin on this then i was hoping i might be there feel it like a banana but no matter i can just slice off this skin carefully feel free to tell me how you think i should have done that because pretty much butchered that i think really but we got something out of it in the end and then we’re just going to cut this on the diagonal into one centimeter slices give that a little bit of salt okay the other one well the other one kind of peeled a little bit more easily but also split in half along its length so i think i probably should have just bought the yellow plantains rather than the green ones but you live and learn so these plantain slices are obviously not going to look as pretty as they should but we’ll carry on anyway i’m sure we’ve got enough intact ones in the mix here to get a nice thumbnail for the video so beans are onto the back burner now so that i can fry my plantain on the front burner here keep a proper eye on it i’m using a deep pan hopefully just to catch some of the splashing which is kind of inevitable when you deep fry things we just need to wait for that oil to heat up sufficiently that we can then fry the plantain pieces beans are over here on the back burner and we’ll just keep an eye on those just keep them bubbling away i’ve got to say i don’t like the smell of palm oil i don’t appreciate the aroma of palm oil it’s just i guess it’s it’s whatever you’re used to but it doesn’t smell pleasant to me right i think this oil is pretty much up to temperature let’s just test that with a small piece that’s looking about right all right those seem like they might be done to me so we’ll get them out onto some paper to drain and now these beans well we can see they’re starting to break up all on their own now so i’m going to turn the heat off now let that cool down so second batch of plantain is cooking let’s have a look at the first batch so yeah well we’ve got a less ripe more starchy plantain we’ve ended up with something fluffy crisp on the outside and fluffy on the inside really nice but yeah nice and fluffy and kind of like potato but not like potato okay so that’s the second batch of plantain done we’re all done now just gotta wait for those beans to cool down and then we’ll serve up and give it a taste well here we go and so my plantain has fried up a little bit more crisp than babatunde’s but we know why that was that was because it was greener and let’s just give it a taste so the beans have gone tender in fact some of them have just broken apart you can see how they’re just falling apart on their own so the beans first yeah and that amount of beans with that amount of peppers yeah it’s hot and spicy for my palate but this is about the chili heat i would expect in a curry or chili anyway so yeah really delicious and the beans just melt in your mouth if you’re from the uk you will probably at this point be thinking yeah that looks like baked beans and the texture is indeed very similar to baked beans but the flavor there’s the chili hit the palm oil has got quite a strong flavor of its own i didn’t appreciate the aroma of it when i was smelling it during cooking but the flavor is actually something quite different the flavors it’s hard to describe but it’s it’s got a distinctive flavor in the same way that good olive oil has so let’s try it all together that’s a really good combination i suspect it would be better still if i’d had a riper plantain and it would have gone caramelized and soft and moist but actually i think i might use plantains a bit more than i currently do because they’re a great carb side for the meal great alternative to potatoes so yeah this is really good since i have a slow cooker i would definitely cook this in the slow cooker in future because it was a big fast standing over those beans making sure they didn’t dry out or burn which i actually almost fumbled at one point but yeah for such a humble dish with so few ingredients it’s really delicious so i thought that was really interesting i hope you did too don’t forget to visit babatunde’s channel link in the description and in that card please show your love to babatunde and thanks babatunde for sharing this recipe with me i’m really enjoying it thanks for watching and i hope to see you again soon [Music] you