Cuban Black Bean Soup

We're currently working on the Cuban section of our WorldEats challenge (even though we are still writing about Canada), so I thought it would be fun to try out the Cuban recipe in our A Taste of The World cookbook. They had a recipe for Cuban black bean soup, which I imagined as a thick stew-like soup, infused with bold and zesty flavors. 

Spoiler: It... didn't exactly turn out like that. It was kind of disappointing and not very flavorful. Maybe someone reading this saga can tell me where I went wrong.

Ingredients

Source - I used the store brand which maybe wasn't as good as Goya

The recipe called for:

- Dried black beans ($1.39)
- Bay leaves ($0.20)
- Red peppers ($2)
- White onions ($1.11)
- Dried oregano
- Ground cumin
- Garlic ($0.10)
- Sherry vinegar ($0.20)
- Dry sherry ($1)
- Salt
- Sugar
- A lot of water

We had the oregano, cumin, salt and sugar already. Usually I would say those were $0 since we had them but I'm going to count them for $0.50-$1 due to the amount of salt, oregano and cumin used. It was at least a third (if not more) of each of our containers of oregano and cumin!

Not a super expensive recipe in the end - maybe around $7 or $8 (and it was enough for a bowl of soup for each of us plus an entire tub of leftover soup) - but still feels like a waste given how we felt about the soup.

Process

Here's how I made the soup, (mostly) following the instructions from the cookbook exactly, and noting where I deviated from them. One would think that some of these modifications would have made for more flavor, not the flavorless mess we were left with. Thank goodness I decided to make ramp biscuits alongside the soup and didn't just plan on eating the bag of cheese crisps.

Step one: Rehydrate the black beans by soaking them for many hours. The recipe said 4, the bag said 8, I did about 6. After some internet research, I'm thinking that 6 was not enough. It also seems I should have (a) soaked them for much, much longer, like 24 hours and/or (b) soaked them with salt water and not just regular water and/or (c) soaked them with some mixture of salt, baking soda and flour and not just regular water and/or (d) tried the hot/boiling water soaking method which they gave as an alternative option and/or (e) pureed some of the beans instead and/or (f) gone with canned black beans instead because I am not good at this.

Step two... although the soup looked pretty much the same all night

Step two: Put the rehydrated beans in a large pot with 4 quarts of water and some bay leaves. They said 2 bay leaves, I used 3.5 (really 4, but 1 was tiny). Bring it to a boil and then simmer on low for at least 2 hours. I simmered for more than 2 hours. But maybe my interpretation of "simmer on low" was lower than intended and it adversely affected the beans?

Step three: Make the sofrito. Saute red peppers until soft, add white onions until soft and translucent, add garlic plus oregano plus cumin plus salt. It smelled really delicious and flavorful and full of spices. I was so excited to add this to the soup because I thought this was going to add so much flavor. Thinking about how excited I was about the sofrito back then makes me laugh now, because I tasted none of it in the soup whatsoever. It was like a complete waste of good ingredients. Anyway, once it's all cooked and ready, puree in blender (or food processor) for a few minutes and then add into the soup, along with the sugar. Keep simmering for another half hour or so.

Sofrito - forgot to take a photo of the puree, but with all those ingredients and tasty vegetables, how could the soup be so flavorless?

Step four: Add more flavoring to the soup with the sherry vinegar, dry sherry and more salt.

Step five (not in cookbook): Try the soup. Realize it is absolutely flavorless and beans are chalky. Raise heat to medium. Add much more salt.

Step six (not in cookbook): Try soup again. Still flavorless. Beans better but still hard. Raise heat to medium high. Add more salt, pepper, oregano, cumin. Go back to making ramp biscuits in case soup ends up in the garbage.

Sherry and sherry vinegar with my cauldron behind it

Step seven (not in cookbook): Keep trying soup. Keep adding salt, pepper, oregano, cumin. Keep raising heat until soup is boiling for another hour or so. Beans getting less chalky but still not soft. Soup still flavorless. How can it be flavorless when it contains that sofrito plus all of these spices plus extra bay leaves? How?! Who vetted this recipe? I used 3-4 times the spices and it still has no flavor!

Step eight (not in cookbook): Give up on adding more seasonings to soup. Let it keep boiling while you enjoy tasty ramp biscuits (thanks to Serious Eats and their recipe). Eventually force yourself to spoon out the soup. Feel sad. Sometimes cooking experiments fail.

Step nine: Add red onion and cilantro for garnish. I didn't bother. Just involved more washing and chopping and it wasn't going to improve the dish enough to be worth it. I guess I could have done the cilantro but I was just so disillusioned that I couldn't muster up the energy. The flavor of the soup should not be coming from the onion and cilantro garnish anyway. Sad.

Review

The "finished product"

If you haven't already gathered from the process section, the soup had almost no positives to it and these were all the things that went wrong:

- Beans were chalky and too hard
- Soup had absolutely no flavor
- It was like tinted water plus black beans
- It was really boring
- It was very watery
- It took forever to make with little to show for it
- Again, it had no flavor, which seems impossible with all those ingredients

What could I do to make the soup better next time (although I doubt there will be a next time for this recipe)?

- Add chorizo, ham or sausage to it. Even hot dogs would have been better. It's not just the salt but the flavor.
- Soak the beans longer and maybe they won't be so hard and chalky.
- Use less water. Why did I need 4 quarts?

Not feeling very inspired to make this again. But I have to try to figure out how to fix the leftover soup to make it more palatable. Right now I'm dreading finishing it but I don't want to waste food or money. Maybe I'll add some meat to it. I don't mind vegan dishes (evidenced by all my vegan Chinese cooking), but this was just flavorless. I hate flavorless food.

I've only had Cuban soup once before. That one wasn't that flavorful either and I ended up adding a lot of green sauce to it, but it was still more flavorful than this mess (which I'm not "counting" toward WorldEats because I don't know that it's really an accurate representation of Cuban soup). I'm just disappointed because I was hoping this would turn out well. I followed the recipe exactly, except for adding more spices and cooking longer than instructed, but those shouldn't have resulted in a flavorless soup. If this is what the recipe is supposed to taste like, I don't know how it made the cookbook. If it's not, I don't know where I went wrong. Sigh, this cooking experiment failed.