February 3rd - Black Bean, Potato and Corn Cakes with Mango Salsa

February 3th – Black Bean, Potato Corn Cake with Mango Salsa
I’ve been trying to cook more vegetarian food of late (ironic at a site called Meat for the Masses) and had an idea early in the morning on what to try for dinner. (I find myself thinking about what to cook for dinner pretty early in the day). We had some leftover black beans in the fridge and I thought about beans cakes but wanted something with more flavors in it and thought about black beans, corn, and potatoes as a base and figured I would add some other things to it as well. Since all of those are pretty hearty flavors, I figured something brighter tasting like a fruit salsa would be a nice contrast.
I made the salsa from mango and added a little diced onion, diced green chili, lemon juice and mint to it and let it sit for about 45 minutes so the flavors could blend. It had good sweetness from the mango and mint and the lemon juice added a balancing acidity. The onion and chili gave it some punch but nothing too extreme.
For the actual cakes, I used some crushed black beans (I just crushed them roughly by hand), some thawed frozen corn (it being February and all), diced onion, garlic, some Mexican oregano, some diced bell pepper, dried red chili, and some ground cumin. I tossed all of this together and then heated a pan. As the pan warmed up, I grated a few russet potatoes and then squeezed the liquid out of them before adding them to the black bean mixture. (Grated potatoes turn black quickly, so I like to prep everything before I do that to minimize the oxidation.) I added some corn starch as well to the mix to help it stay together. I realized that the mix was a little loose and may be tough to flip, so I decided to make one large pan sized cake that I would cut into wedges (and that could be flipped easily with the help of a plate). I cooked it on medium heat to get a good crust but also to allow it enough time to cook everything all the way through.
When it was done, I slid it out of the pan and cut it into wedges and served the mango salsa on the side. The flavors were awesome and the salsa was a great contrast to the crusty cake. I would like to figure out a way to make the mix a little more solid so I could do smaller cakes as opposed to one large one, but I’d want to minimize the use of flour or anything else that might mute the flavors. None of the flavors in the cakes overwhelmed anything else. You would get bites where you tasted different components clearly but everything was a good mix. You could pick out individual flavors of each component but everything was well balanced. The salsa was a bright contrast to have on the side.
I had initially thought about doing a darker sweeter beer with this, but still had most of a pint of English bitter that I had poured while I was cooking, so I just kept to that. This is the same homebrewed bitter I’ve written about in the past, but it’s in a nice phase right now. Some of the fresher flavors have diminished but the caramel and nutty flavors seem better integrated and the hop aroma has taken on a nice slightly flora and tea-like aroma. The beer actually seems better integrated now than it did a few weeks ago, although I normally think of this as a style of beer that is best drunk young. It was a refreshing beer with the food, and complimented the flavors. The slight sweetness picked up the caramelized notes of the crust and the sweetness of the corn. It was a happy accident that I ended up drinking this beer instead of the brown ale or porter that I had initially thought about.