Red Beans and Rice

A pot that asks for almost nothing from you except time. Andouille, a smoked ham hock, and the trinity, spooned over long grain rice that we cook in its own pot.

Prep: 20 min · Cook: 2 hr 30 min · Serves: 8 · Rice: Long grain

Why Monday

Red beans and rice became a Monday dish because Monday was wash day. The beans could sit at a low simmer all morning without anyone watching them, and the ham bone from Sunday dinner was still in the kitchen waiting for a job.

That is the whole origin of the recipe, and it still shapes how it should be cooked. This is not a dish you rush. Everything good about it comes from a pot of beans breaking down slowly over two hours until the liquid around them turns thick and glossy on its own.

We asked our own team about their go-to rice recipes a while back, and red beans and rice came up twice without prompting. Matt Fowler, who runs operations at our mill, said his favorite was "a tie between Gumbo and Red Beans and Rice." Jason Bankston, our Director of Warehouse and Logistics, put it more plainly: "Regular long-grain rice for me! My go-to recipes are Hamburger steak over rice and gravy or red beans and rice!" You can read the rest of what they had to say in our interview with the 4Sisters team.

Jason is right about the rice, too. This is a long grain dish. The beans bring the creaminess, so the rice needs to stay fluffy and separate underneath them rather than joining in.

• Soak the beans overnight. It cuts close to an hour off the simmer and helps them cook evenly.

• Cook the rice in a separate pot. Red beans and rice is a two-pot dish, unlike jambalaya where the rice goes in with everything else.

• Mash about a cup of the cooked beans against the side of the pot. That is what makes the gravy creamy, and there is no dairy in it at all.

Ingredients

• 1 lb dried red kidney beans

• 2 cups 4Sisters Organic White Rice

• 1 lb andouille sausage, sliced 1/2 inch thick

• 1 smoked ham hock, about 3/4 lb

• 2 tbsp bacon drippings or neutral oil

• 1 large yellow onion, diced

• 3 ribs celery, diced

• 1 green bell pepper, diced

• 6 cloves garlic, minced

• 2 bay leaves

• 1 tsp dried thyme

• 1 1/2 tsp Cajun seasoning

• 1/2 tsp black pepper

• 8 cups water or unsalted chicken stock

• 4 green onions, sliced thin

• Kosher salt, hot sauce, and cider vinegar, to finish

The Soak

Soak the beans overnight

Put the beans in a large bowl, cover them with about three inches of cold water, and leave them on the counter overnight, or at least 8 hours. They will roughly double. Drain them and rinse before they go in the pot.

If you forgot, cover them with water in a pot, bring it to a boil for 2 minutes, take it off the heat, and let it stand covered for an hour. Drain and carry on. The texture is very slightly less even, and nobody at the table will say anything.

Cut everything before you start

Dice the onion, celery, and bell pepper, and mince the garlic separately. Slice the andouille into half inch coins.

Everything good about this dish comes from beans breaking down slowly until the liquid turns thick on its own.

Cooking

Brown the andouille

Heat the bacon drippings in a heavy pot over medium-high and brown the andouille coins on both sides, about 5 minutes. Lift them out with a slotted spoon and leave the fat behind. This step is worth doing properly, because the browned sausage fat is the backbone of the whole pot.

Sweat the trinity

Drop the onion, celery, and bell pepper into the hot fat with a good pinch of salt. Cook 8 to 10 minutes until soft and just starting to color. Add the garlic, thyme, Cajun seasoning, and black pepper, and stir for a minute.

Simmer two hours

Return the sausage to the pot along with the drained beans, the ham hock, the bay leaves, and the water. Bring it up to a boil, then drop it to the barest simmer, cover it partially, and leave it alone for 2 hours. Stir every half hour or so and top up with hot water if the beans ever peek above the liquid.

The beans are ready when they crush easily against the roof of your mouth. Older beans can take another 30 minutes, so taste rather than watching the clock.

Mash and finish

Pull out the ham hock, strip the meat off it, chop it, and stir it back in. Discard the bay leaves. Now take a wooden spoon and mash about a cup of the beans against the side of the pot, then stir. Simmer uncovered another 20 minutes until the liquid coats a spoon.

Season with salt, a few dashes of hot sauce, and a small splash of cider vinegar. The vinegar is the finishing touch that keeps two hours of pork from tasting flat.

While the beans finish, cook the rice in its own pot. For our long grain white, that means 1 cup of rice to 2 cups of water, brought to a boil, then covered and simmered on low for 20 minutes and rested off the heat for 5 before fluffing. Two cups of dry rice serves eight people alongside this much beans.

Keeping the two separate is not a technicality, it is the dish. The rice should sit underneath as a distinct layer so the bean gravy runs over it. If you have ever had red beans and rice arrive as one uniform bowl of starch, that is what went wrong.

Tip from the farm

Cook it a day early. Red beans are one of the few dishes that genuinely improve overnight, because the starch that leached out of the beans keeps thickening as it cools. Reheat gently with a splash of water and cook fresh rice the day you serve it. Never reheat the rice with the beans in the same pot.

How We Serve It

We serve it in shallow bowls, rice first and beans ladled over, with green onions on top and hot sauce and cornbread on the table. A simple green salad with a sharp vinaigrette is the only other thing it needs.

Louisiana is one of the largest rice producing states in the country, and beans over rice is the most honest expression of why. It is cheap, it feeds a crowd, and it was built around what a working household already had. The USDA Economic Research Service keeps a good overview of where American rice is grown if you are curious how much of it comes out of our part of the state, and USA Rice is the industry body our own CEO Meryl Kennedy has chaired.

For the other Louisiana pot we make most often, see our recipe collection, and if you want to know how the rice in that bag was grown, our team wrote about that in seed to table.

Questions We Get

Onion, celery, and green bell pepper, usually in a rough ratio of two parts onion to one part each of the others. It is the Louisiana equivalent of a French mirepoix, with bell pepper standing in for carrot. Nearly every Cajun and Creole dish we cook starts by softening those three in fat, red beans and rice included.

Mash about a cup of the cooked beans against the side of the pot and stir them back in, then simmer uncovered for another 20 minutes. The starch released from the crushed beans thickens the surrounding liquid into a gravy. There is no dairy, no flour, and no roux in a traditional pot of red beans.

No. Red beans and rice is a two-pot dish, and that separates it from jambalaya, where the rice cooks in the same pot as everything else. Cook 2 cups of long grain white rice separately and spoon the beans over it. Cooking the rice in the bean liquid gives you something closer to a bean jambalaya, which is a fine dinner but a different one.