Photo: Melsj · CC BY-SA 4.0
Feijão Tropeiro (Beans Tossed with Toasted Cassava Flour, Bacon and Egg)
A bean dish from Minas Gerais: cooked beans tossed with egg and kale in the fat left from frying bacon and sausage, with toasted cassava flour added last to take up all the fat and the bean liquid in the pan. The flour has already been toasted and needs no more cooking, so it works the instant it goes in, turning a bean dish with liquid into one with none. The name comes from the muleteers of seventeenth-century Brazil.
Ingredients
- Beans
- pinto or red kidney beans · dried, soaked overnight; or 600g cooked tinned beans250 g
- bay leaves2
- The pan
- bacon · chopped small150 g
- lard or oil1 tbsp
- linguiça (or another smoked sausage) · thinly sliced200 g
- onion · chopped1
- garlic · chopped3 cloves
- eggs3
- kale or collard leaves · stems out, shredded very fine4
- cassava flour (farinha de mandioca) · the coarse toasted kind, from a Brazilian or Latin American grocer120 g
- salt and pepper
- spring onion and parsley · a handful, chopped
Steps
- ⏲ 50 min
Drain the soaked beans, cover with fresh water and add the bay leaves. Boil hard for the first 10 minutes (red kidney beans must reach a full boil to destroy their lectin), then lower to a simmer until soft but not split: 40-60 minutes in a pot, much less in a pressure cooker.
Drain the beans in a sieve, keeping one ladle of the cooking water aside. Beans left sitting in liquid turn the flour to a paste later on.
- ⏲ 10 min
Put a little lard in a large pan and fry the bacon over low heat to render its fat. Lift it out when crisp. Fry the sausage in the same fat and lift it out.
- ⏲ 5 min
In the fat left behind, soften the onion and garlic, scraping up what has stuck to the pan. Crack in the eggs and scramble them in large pieces.
- ⏲ 2 min
Add the beans and kale and toss for 2 minutes to heat through. The kale only needs to wilt.
Scatter in the cassava flour in two or three lots, tossing. Stop when the flour has taken up the fat and the bean liquid, the pan bottom is dry, and the whole thing is moist but loose. If it goes too dry, add a spoon or two of the reserved bean water.
Return the bacon and sausage, season with salt and pepper, and scatter over the spring onion and parsley. Serve with rice.
Tips & Variations
Variations
- With torresmo: many restaurants top it with torresmo, crisp-fried pork skin. That is what is mixed through the beans in the photograph.
- On one plate with rice: in Minas Gerais it sits in the middle of a plate of rice, pork ribs or sausage and boiled greens.
- Without egg: some households leave the egg out. The flour takes up the fat just the same.
- Other beans: pinto (carioca) beans are the usual choice in Minas Gerais. Black beans work but are less common.
Tips
- It is a flour that is already cooked. Cassava flour, farinha de mandioca, is made by pressing the juice out of grated cassava and toasting what is left in a pan. Pato no tucupi is about the juice: "Tucupi is the juice wrung out of grated cassava when that flour is made." This dish uses the other half, the flour. Because it was toasted in the making, the premise under choosing flour, that flour is raw and heat arrives later, does not hold. It is the case of kama: "The point of the flour is that it has already been cooked."
- So it goes in last, once the cooking is nearly over. The flour needs no cooking; it only takes up fat and water, and it does that the moment it goes in. The fat from the bacon and sausage, the bean liquid on the beans and the moisture from the egg all go into it, and nothing is left on the bottom of the pan. That is how a bean dish with liquid becomes one with none.
- The beans go in drained. With too much bean liquid the flour takes up all it can and then turns to paste. Keep one ladle back and add it a spoon at a time only if the pan is too dry once all the flour is in. Adding water later is easier to correct than holding flour back.
- Add the flour in lots. Tipped in at once, the first place it lands turns to paste and the rest stays dry. Two or three scatterings, tossing in between, and stop when it is evenly moist.
- One pan, one fat. The bacon fat fries the sausage, and that fat softens the onion and garlic as they lift the fond (browning). Everything built up there ends in the flour. Pour the fat away and the flour has nothing to take up.
- What the name says. Tropeiros were the drovers who moved goods by mule. Dried beans and a cassava flour that was already cooked are said to have been food that kept on the road — the reason kama gives for its roasted flour too: it needs no cooking at any stage, "which is why it was carried on journeys".
The basics behind this dish
- Browning and the Maillard ReactionMeat fails to brown for one of three reasons: it is wet, the pan is cool, or you put too much in at once. Plus how the brown film stuck to the pan becomes your sauce.
- Cooking Meat: Temperature, Resting, and Cutting Against the GrainDoneness is a core temperature, not a number of minutes. What resting actually does, how to handle a thick cut, and why the direction you slice changes the texture.
- Knife Skills: Grip, Cuts, and Why Size MattersHow you hold the knife matters more than how fast you cut. The pinch grip, the claw hand, and why uniform size is a cooking decision rather than a cosmetic one.
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