Jacques Pépin's Hearty Kidney Bean Stew Recipe | Cooking at Home | KQED

Hi, I'm Jacques Pepin and I'm cooking at home. Sometimes I cook dinner or lunch depending on what I have around. Very often it's the cake. And in that case here I had a can of dark kidney beans and other things. I'm going to do a stew with it. Starting with like a tablespoon of olive oil here and I'm going to put some lardons in it. What we call lardons in French, L-A-R-D-O-N, which is little diced pancetta. That is, it's like the same cut than bacon, but it's not smoked. If you want to use bacon in there, it's perfectly fine. You can use bacon instead of that. I put a third of a cup, which is about a ounce and a half. And I'm going to sauté this with half a cup of onion. Very nicely sharpening. Okay. Okay. It's browning a little bit here. Nicely. So two, three minutes. We'll put the onion, I'm going to go with it. And one, two cloves of garlic. Crush it first and then cut it. And chop it coarsely. Maybe the garlic. I think I need a little more oil, so I would put probably two tablespoons to start with. And here I have a paper, which sometimes is hot, sometimes it's not. It's a Poblano paper. And the Poblano paper, sometimes you test it. It's really pretty hot. Some of the time it's not. So here I will cut it coarsely. In there. Okay. I will add to it. Beautiful color. And then in there, probably half a cup of diced tomato. And I usually use Italian diced tomato. Very good, half a cup. And my red beans. I'm going to pour some of the water out, about half of it. I should keep some in there. I have the stew here. You want to taste it with a bit of salt. Yeah, you want them to cook for five minutes so the pepper is cooked and the onion and so forth. I'm going to put some cilantro at the end. When I buy cilantro, very often I buy the bunch of cilantro. I cut the front, the leaves. I use them within one or two days. And the rest of it, like this one is, I put that in the freezer. And this has a lot of taste, the stem. So when you cut it here, it kind of crumble. It kind of crumble into... But I always, when I do, especially stew of beans, I use cilantro, a lot of it. Then I use the stem. It has as much taste as the leaf, if not more. I'm putting that in there. And this is it. You can put your pan right in the middle of the table or put it into a dish like this. You can one or the other, but it's a beautiful stew. Be great with a grilled pork chop or a steak or a piece of chicken. Stew of red beans. Happy cooking.