Yeast “Cornbread” and Beans

This week, I fixed a nice pot of pinto beans and hamhock, and since I made them using a pressure cooker—a departure for me, but one I’ll do agai, cos the beans turned out great!—I decided to also vary the cornbread.

So, I took last week’s bread machine bread and varied it thusly:

• 1.5 cups warm water (about 115 degrees fahrenheit)
• 0.5-1.0 tsp salt (mostly a matter of taste)
• 3 Tbs oil (I prefer a good, full-flavored olive oil for this)
• 2 eggs (added last immediately before the dry ingredients)

Mix the dry ingredients separately and add them all at once:

• 1.5 C corn meal
• 1 C white flour
• 0.5 C whole wheat flour
• 3 tsp active dry yeast
• 0.25 C oat bran
• 0.25 C garbanzo bean flour
• 0.5 C vanilla protein powder (mostly soy)

Dumped it all in the order listed in my bread machine, set for a 2-pound loaf and walked away.

The bread and the pressure-cooked pinto beans were ready together.

Ambrosia.

Oh, the pressure-cooked pintos? Sure, why not?

2 C washed and sorted pinto beans (I just used a colander and picked them out of a full stream of water by the handful to sort and rinse, this time)
6 C water to start

Brought the pressure cooker to a “huff” under 15 pounds pressure and removed it from the heat. Let the beans soak for an hour. Removed the lid, discarded the water and re-rinsed. Added 6 cups water, 2 smoked hamhocks and set them on the stove to presurize at 5 pounds. When the cooker began huffing, I backed the heat off to the lowest setting and left them. When the bread was done, so were the beans and the hamhocks. Added some barbeque sauce and brought them back to a simmer, uncovered for about 15 minutes, to thicken the juices a bit.

Too delicious to save any leftovers for chili… *sigh*

🙂