A watercolour of white rice cooked in coconut milk with dark red kidney beans running through it
Generated with OpenAI gpt-image-1
Adapted from Caribbean rice and peas

Rice and peas with coconut

An established dish converted to shelf-stable ingredients. Every substitution is documented below.

How long it keeps

About 24 months, set by Long grain rice.

Indicative, for planning a build before you buy. The answer for a pack you already own is the best before date printed on it, and that only holds if it has been stored as the label says.

Serves
4
Burners
1
Pans
1
Water
0.4 L
Active
8 min
Total
28 min

Ingredients

The peas are beans, which confuses everyone once. This is the dish that makes a tin of kidney beans into dinner rather than an ingredient.

  1. Coconut milk into the pan with 250 ml water, the dried onion, garlic, herbs, chilli and salt. Brought to a simmer.
  2. Rinsed rice in. Drained kidney beans in.
  3. Lid on, lowest heat you can hold, eighteen minutes. Do not stir it. Stirring rice cooking in coconut milk makes it claggy.
  4. Off the heat, lid on, five minutes more. Then forked through.

The coconut milk is doing two jobs: fat, which rice needs, and enough sugar to round off the beans. Using water alone gives you rice with beans in it, which is a different and worse thing.

Tinned kidney beans are already cooked and carry none of the risk that dried ones do, but the difference is worth understanding: kidney beans and the slow cooker trap.

Serves 4.

What this was adapted from

Caribbean rice and peas: rice cooked in coconut milk with kidney beans, thyme and allspice

  • fresh thyme and spring onion → dried mixed herbs and dried onion

    The aromatics are cooked into the liquid and strained out in effect, so dried does most of the work. It is a quieter dish than the original and honest about that.

  • scotch bonnet, whole → chilli flakes to taste

    A whole bonnet is added for perfume rather than heat and removed. Flakes give heat without the perfume, so use fewer than you think and treat it as seasoning rather than the point.