In My Garden: Epazote!

May 4

Above: Epazote plant in my yard.

As a long-time resident of Southern California, I have the advantage of being exposed to Mexican foods, and they almost always involve beans. Mexican cooks have long known that cooking beans with the herb epazote (pronounced eh-puh-ZOE-tay) enhances the flavor and aids in digestion (reducing the gas beans often cause). Fresh epazote smells something akin to shoe polish, but I kid you not, it mellows with cooking, and adds a distinctive flavor to the cooked beans. We wouldn't cook our beans without it.

We used to buy fresh epazote in our local Mexican market. Several years ago I found some epazote seeds in a catalog and decided to give them a try. My wife, Laura, harvests the leaves, dries them in the dehydrator and stores them in glass mason jars in our pantry. We rarely buy canned beans, preferring the freshness of cooking up big pots of dried beans from scratch. This is where the epazote comes in. Just take a few dried leaves and crumble them into the pot with the simmering beans. You will be surprised at the flavor, it's very unusual.

You can easily find dried epazote in many herb shops online. But the plant grows like a weed, and comes back every year. It hardly needs any water, which is very good in this drought we are having in Southern Cali. So if you have a small space and are inclined to try something a little different, grow yourself an epazote plant and get those black beans simmering!