HOW TO MAKE REFRIED BEANS EXTRA CREAMY AND DELICIOUS: Simple Down Home Recipe

Hi everyone, I'm Marci and I've been getting a lot of requests for me to share how I make my refried beans. Honestly I feel a little silly sharing this because it's not much of a recipe but at the same time beans are such an important staple in my culture and so I do think it is important that everyone knows how to make them. So I'll go ahead and walk you through very simply and then I'm going to show you how you can boost the flavor in the end to make them extra creamy and delicious. I figure I may as well start at the beginning. You'll need pinto beans and just how many you're going to cook depends on how big your family is and how often you plan to make refried beans. If it's something that you want to cook as a side dish throughout the week then obviously you're going to want to make a bigger pot that you can store in the refrigerator and then just pull out as needed. Now that it's just my husband and I at home I don't need to cook as many so I'm just going to pour out what's right for us and that's probably about maybe three cups right there and even though they look clean you can never trust that. You need to make sure that you clean and sort them. In fact this is a great job to give to kids. Just give them a nice big pan like this have them set it just underneath the lip of the table or your counter and have them sort through each one setting aside anything that looks questionable. Once you've got all your beans cleaned and sorted you want to fill the pot up with water and let them soak overnight. This step is really important because what soaking does is it allows some of the sugars that are inside the beans to be released and that's what tends to give people gas so you definitely don't want to skip the soaking overnight. To save time I cleaned and soaked these beans last night. Now I'm going to drain that water and rinse the beans again with fresh water before cooking them. You can cook them on the stovetop and have them fully cooked in a couple of hours but I like to cook mine in the crock pot low and slow. I just put the beans in and make sure I cover them with plenty of water. This is probably around seven or eight cups of water and this way I don't need to babysit them I just leave them cooking while I take care of other things. These beans have been cooking about six hours they're just about done and it's at this point that you want to add the salt. You never want to add it too soon in the cooking process because it'll cause your beans to harden. My mom always taught me to add it in about the last half hour of cooking time and how much salt you add will depend on your personal preference and obviously on how many beans you're cooking. Now I already know this is about right for me. I'll just go ahead and stir it and that's it. In fact I think I'm going to go ahead and turn these off because they look like they're done. You can of course eat them like this but once they cool you'll want to place them in a container with the lid and store them in the refrigerator. For this you just need to heat your skillet over medium high heat and you're going to want to coat it with just a little bit of oil. Now one way that you can boost the flavor is if you have bacon grease you can cook the beans in that. Once the oil is hot use a big spoon to ladle in the beans making sure you include plenty of the liquid because that's how we get them creamy. And once the beans are hot take a masher like this and mash away until your desired level of creaminess. A lot of that liquid will evaporate as the beans continue to cook so feel free to add more if you think it needs it. Then sprinkle in some freshly grated cheese of your choice. I'm using a mild cheddar and let it all melt into the beans. Now I like my refried beans sort of creamy and runny like this but if I was going to be making burritos you can't work with very runny beans so what you would want to do is just cook them longer so that they dry up just a little and then you can work them into some burritos very easily that way. Well these are done and I'm going to show you another way that you can boost the flavor when making refried beans. And now I'm going to make refried beans with chorizo. This just adds a whole other level of yummy flavor. For this you just heat up your pan and because there's plenty of fat already in the chorizo itself you may not need to add any oil. Just break up the chorizo as it cooks then add in the beans along with some of the liquid and once they're nice and hot mash away. The chorizo gives the refried beans a nice color and adds a great bit of flavor without being overly spicy. So there you have it my creamy cheesy refried beans and my delicious flavor-packed chorizo refried beans. Both of them very very simple to make and they're just a perfect side dish for any meal and an important staple to our diet as I was mentioning earlier. I hope that you try it and next week I'm going to show you how to make borracho beans which are a drunken bean and that's a little more of a recipe so I hope you come back for that one. Thanks so much for checking out this video. If you liked it be sure to give it a thumbs up and subscribe if you haven't already. You can also follow me at Marci Inspired on Instagram and Facebook. Until next time, blessings from my kitchen to yours.