Last week Grant Achatz of Alinea, who kicked off this new feature by creating a cocktail using kluwak kupas, challenged Curtis Duffy of Avenues to come up with the next recipe using Chinese black beans.
Chinese black beans—not to be confused with the turtle beans you’ll find in your burrito—are soybeans that have been fermented and salted, a process that turns them black. Duffy noted, “they’re earthy, they’re sour, they’re very funky . . . haunting, if you will.
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“They’re not pleasant to eat” straight up, he added. “They leave an aftertaste in your mouth that sticks with you for a good 20 minutes. And the smell—it smells very . . . funky.”
“The only thing we didn’t do with this dessert was add the actual beans back to it,” Duffy admitted. “We cooked them a few times in simple syrup after they’d been soaked; we did a lot of things that I thought would work, but we failed.”
“Grant throwing me under the bus with the black beans” motivated him to find a challenging ingredient, Duffy said. He uses geraniums often at Avenues—but in the summer, when they usually bloom. And he suspected des Rosiers hasn’t cooked with them before.
200 g Chinese black beans, soaked and rinsed three times
