In recent days, a generous friend served as a “forager” for the blog, obtaining some leaves from a Mexicola avocado tree, one of the varieties that has a distinct fragrance, as my previous post on avocado leaves explained. Since I had first seen the leaves used to flavor black beans — and had just purchased a new bag of Rancho Gordo’s Midnight Beans — I decided to debut the fresh leaves in a black bean dish, using a recipe in Rick Bayless’s Mexican Kitchen as an inspiration.¹

I made a few changes to the Bayless’s recipe, notably using Rancho Gordo’s cooking method for the beans, frying the chorizo before adding it to the beans, not pureeing the beans at the end, and skipping the garnishes. The result was superb, with the anise-ish flavor of the avocado leaf complementing the rich sausage and earthy beans.

It seemed to me that the spices in the chorizo were a key factor in the dish’s success, so if you don’t eat pork, you might be able to craft a good approximation by incorporating some of the non-meat ingredients that go into chorizo. A recipe for red chorizo in Diana Kennedy’s From My Mexican Kitchen is one example.

In Kennedy’s recipe, ground pork is combined with a paste made from guajillo chiles, white vinegar, garlic, Mexican bay leaves (Litsea glaucescens, but the European Laurus nobilis make a suitable substitute), thyme, marjoram, Mexican oregano, cloves, allspice, and salt. To make the paste, the chiles are cleaned, deseeded, and soaked in warm water to soften. Once softened, they are drained and soaked in vinegar for an hour. Then the chiles and all of the other flavorings go into a blender, are pureed as smooth as possible and pressed through a sieve to remove seeds and other roughage (note that this is basically the procedure you’d use when making a mole or red chile enchilada sauce).

To use in the beans, I would then cook the paste: heat oil in a sauce pan over medium-high heat, then add as much of the puree as I planned to use (a few tablespoons), stir well, and cook for a few minutes until it thickens slightly (again, like you’d do for a mole or enchilada sauce).

Ideally, my next project with avocado leaves would be a batch of tamales where I placed strips of avocado leaves between the tamale dough and the corn husk, but I probably won’t have the energy for tamales in the near future, so I might instead try something simpler like the baked masa creation in Bayless’s Mexican Kitchen (which is essentially a large batch of tamale batter stuffed with vegetables and baked in a loaf pan), placing a leaf or two between the batter and the pan so its magical flavors can infuse the masa and vegetables.

Photo Credit

Photo of Avocado leaves from Kathy MacKey’s flickr collection, subject to a Creative Commons License.

Note

1. Leaves from the Hass variety, which is a hybrid Guatemalan-Mexican, do not have much flavor. Note also that while there have been reports that avocado leaves are toxic, this seems to apply only to leaves from Guatemalan and hybrid Guatemalan-Mexican varieties. Diana Kennedy, in her book From My Mexican Kitchen, tries to clear up the confusion around the subject, noting that Mexican varieties were not found to be toxic, and in any case, “it seems unlikely that the small amounts used in cooking would cause any problems” (the full section is quoted at Gourmet Sleuth).