Mexican Style Beans Spiked With Salsa Roja and Pickled Red Onions

May 25, 2024

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I get kind of weird about beans. If they pop into my head as a lunch or dinner idea, they take over my every thought until I’m chowing down on a big bowl of them.

Everyone’s got their addictions I suppose.

I’ve been tinkering with Mexican beans for a while now. Not the refried variety, more Mexican flavours infused into big hearty bean bowls.

But many fell kind of flat. Sticking a bit of ground cumin and maybe a chilli or two into beans is nice and all, but not layered with enough flavour for my flavour-bomb-obsessed palate.

That is until I had the genius (if I do say so myself) idea of mixing in one of the punchiest Mexican sauces I’ve ever made.

Salsa roja.

Salsa roja is one of those too-simple-to-taste-this-good kind of recipe. How can tomatoes, onions and dried chillies taste so good?

But they do.

I use an adapted version of Enrique Olvera’s salsa roja as seen in his brilliant book Mi Casa Tu Casa. You can make some adaptions, but the holy trinity of smoky onion, tomatoes and chillies must always remain.

This is the sort of recipe I love. Completely adaptable, full of storecupboard ingredients and the leftovers will make your breakfasts far more interesting in the coming days.

As I always try to do with The Capsule Pantry, I’ve included plenty of ways to adapt the recipe as well plenty of ways to use any leftover ingredients.

Let’s get to work.

I like to think of dishes like this as having two parts. The high and the low — or as we say here in Portugal, alto and baixo.

The baixo part is the deep, earthy flavours from the beans, cumin, onions, smoky Mexican chillies and oregano. All delicious in their own right of course, but if you forget about adding the alto, you run the risk of having a claggy, boring dish on your hands.

The reason you don’t is because of our old friend acid. It’s the acid that provides the lift.

In this dish, the acid comes from places like the tomatoes in the salsa roja, the sour cream, and the pickled onions.

It’s these little nuggets of fresh flavour that pulls everything together. It’s also why I chose to mix the salsa roja into the beans rather than serving it on the side or dotted on top. The acid contained within the salsa roja is distributed throughout the whole thing, lifting it into something better than the sum of its parts.