Taco night, but the whole thing happens in one skillet and the only thing you are opening is a can of beans.
This is ground beef and black beans cooked down with organic Rock Yo' Taco until the sauce is thick enough to hold its shape on a tortilla. No foil packet of mystery powder, no anti-caking agents, and you control the salt instead of a factory. It takes forty minutes start to finish and most of that is the pan doing the work while you set the table.
Two things make it taste like it took longer than it did. The beef gets four minutes face-down in a hot pan without being touched, which builds the brown crust that most weeknight ground beef never gets. Then the seasoning goes in twice — once on the raw meat, once bloomed in the beef fat with a spoonful of tomato paste before any liquid arrives.
Serve it however your table likes it. Piled into warm tortillas, spooned over rice, or loaded onto chips with the cheese melted on top. It doubles without complaint for a crowd, and the leftovers make a better quesadilla than the original.
Beef and Black Bean Skillet with Rock Yo' Taco
One skillet of ground beef and black beans seasoned twice with organic Rock Yo' Taco, thick enough to pile into tortillas, spoon over rice or load onto chips.
Ingredients
For the skillet
- 1 1/2 lb ground beef, 85/15
- 1 Tbsp olive oil or avocado oil
- 1 medium yellow onion, diced
- 1 red bell pepper, diced
- 3 cloves garlic, minced
- 2 Tbsp plus 1/4 tsp Rock Yo' Taco organic seasoning, divided
- 1 (15 oz) can black beans, drained and rinsed
- 1 (10 oz) can diced tomatoes with green chiles, undrained
- 1/2 cup low-sodium beef or chicken broth
- 1 Tbsp tomato paste
- Juice of 1 lime
To finish
- 1 cup shredded sharp cheddar or a Mexican blend, optional
- Chopped fresh cilantro and sliced scallion
- Flaky sea salt, to taste at the table
On the table
- Warm corn or flour tortillas, cooked rice, or tortilla chips
- Sour cream, diced avocado, pickled jalapeños, lime wedges
Instructions
- Pat the beef dry and break it into rough clumps on a plate. Scatter 1 tablespoon of the Rock Yo' Taco over it and leave it while you chop the onion, the pepper and the garlic. Ten minutes of sitting lets the salt in the blend start working into the surface of the meat rather than sitting on top of it.
- Heat the oil in a 12-inch skillet over medium-high until it shimmers. Add the beef in one layer and leave it completely alone for 4 minutes. You want a dark brown crust on the underside before anything gets stirred, and stirring too early steams the meat grey instead.
- Break the beef up with the back of a wooden spoon and cook 4 to 5 minutes more, until no pink is left. Tip off all but about a tablespoon of the fat. Keep that tablespoon: it is where the next step happens.
- Push the beef to the edges of the pan. Drop the onion and the bell pepper into the cleared middle and cook 4 to 5 minutes over medium, scraping the browned bits off the bottom as the vegetables give up their moisture, until the onion is soft and colouring at the edges. Add the garlic and cook 30 seconds more, just until it smells like garlic rather than raw.
- Add the tomato paste and the remaining 1 tablespoon plus 1/4 teaspoon of Rock Yo' Taco, stir everything together, and cook for a full minute. This is the step that makes the dish. Spices bloom in fat, and a minute in the hot beef fat is the difference between layered and dusty. Tipped into liquid instead, they only dissolve.
- Pour in the tomatoes with all their juice and the broth. Scrape the bottom of the pan clean one more time and bring it up to a simmer.
- Add the black beans, stir gently so they stay whole, and simmer uncovered 8 to 10 minutes, until the liquid has reduced to a thick sauce that coats the back of a spoon rather than pooling. Stir once or twice. If it tightens too far, loosen it with a splash of broth.
- Taste it. Add another pinch of Rock Yo' Taco if you want it louder, and salt only if it needs it, since the blend already starts with sea salt.
- If you want cheese, scatter it over the top, take the pan off the heat, cover it, and leave it 2 minutes to melt in the residual heat. Covering it over a live burner is what catches the bottom.
- Squeeze the lime over everything and scatter the cilantro and scallion. Bring the skillet to the table with the tortillas, rice or chips and let everybody build their own.
The seasoning goes in twice, and that is the whole method
One tablespoon on the raw beef, one tablespoon and a quarter teaspoon bloomed in the fat with the tomato paste after the vegetables are soft. Two tablespoons and a quarter teaspoon in total, divided. Put it all in at the end and the beef underneath tastes of nothing; put it all on at the start and it scorches on the bottom of the pan while the beef browns. Split it and both things happen properly.
Let the beef sit still
Four minutes, untouched, in a hot pan. Most ground beef never gets a crust because it gets stirred the moment it hits the pan, and what you end up with is grey, slightly boiled meat. The brown crust and the fond it leaves on the bottom of the skillet is most of the flavour in this dish, and the tomatoes and broth lift all of it back off in step six.
What is actually in season right now
Yellow onions and garlic came out of the fall harvest across the Carolinas and keep in a dark cupboard all winter, so this is the month they are at their best and their cheapest. Bell peppers are at the very tail end of their run — field peppers keep coming until the first hard frost, and these are the last few weeks to buy them from somebody local rather than off a truck. Cilantro likes the cool nights and is coming back on now after sulking through the summer.
The tomatoes are canned and we are not going to pretend otherwise. A good can picked at peak in August beats anything sitting pale in a bin in late October, and the beans are pantry too, and good pantry.
If you want something that came out of the ground this week, two big handfuls of chopped collards stirred in with the beans will be tender by the time the sauce has reduced, and they sweeten after the first cool nights. A cup of small-diced North Carolina sweet potato added with the peppers is the other good October answer, with that harvest at its peak right now — it goes beautifully with the cocoa and chile in the blend. A sharp slaw of shredded fall cabbage and lime on top of the tacos is the third.
Which beef to buy
Eighty-five fifteen. Ninety-three per cent lean browns to sawdust in a pan this hot and there is not enough fat to bloom the spices in, which is the one step you cannot skip here. Eighty twenty works and tastes very good, but you will be pouring off a lot more fat. If all you have is lean beef, add a second tablespoon of oil before the seasoning goes in.
Feeding a crowd
This doubles cleanly, which is not true of most skillet dinners, because nothing in it needs to brown in a single layer except the beef itself. Brown the beef in two batches in a wide Dutch oven, take the first batch out while the second goes in, then carry on as written. It is a generous thing to put in the middle of a table: the skillet goes down, the warm tortillas go round, and nobody has to plate anything.
The day after
It keeps four days in the refrigerator and is honestly better on the second day, once the beans have taken on the seasoning. Warm it in a skillet with a splash of broth rather than in the microwave, so it loosens instead of drying out. Cold, it is the best quesadilla filling in the house, it makes a very good baked potato, and a scoop of it under a fried egg is a breakfast worth getting up for. It also freezes well in a flat bag for three months.
Make it yours, and mind the heat
The blend is deliberately mild, which is the right call when you are feeding people between eight and eighty. If your table wants more, a pinch of cayenne or a chopped chipotle in adobo stirred in with the broth does it without fighting the cocoa in the blend. A cup of frozen corn added with the beans is the easy addition, and leaving the beef out altogether and doubling the beans makes a genuinely good meatless skillet.
One seasoning doing all of it
Rock Yo' Taco is our USDA Certified Organic taco blend — eleven ingredients, starting with sea salt, then organic onion, paprika, garlic, New Mexico chile, cumin, ancho, cocoa powder, oregano, coriander and red pepper. The cocoa is the one that surprises people. Nobody tastes chocolate; it just rounds the finish the way it does in a good pot of chili, and it is why a thirty-minute skillet tastes like it sat on the stove a lot longer. No MSG, no fillers, no anti-caking agents, small batch, made by our family. And you control the salt, not a foil packet.
The seasoning itself is gluten free and kosher, and so are the beans and the beef. The dish is only gluten free if what you serve it with is — corn tortillas and most tortilla chips are, flour tortillas are not, and canned tomatoes with chiles and broth are both worth a label check. We make it in the 5 oz resealable pouch, which stores flat in the cupboard and is easy to pinch from one-handed with the pan going.
More to put beside it
If this is your sort of weeknight, One-Pot Chicken Burrito Bowls is the same blend doing the same job with chicken and rice in the pan, and Chicken Enchilada Casserole is the oven version. Rock Yo' Taco Chicken Tortilla Soup is what to make with the half pouch left over. For the table itself, Rock Yo Taco Nachos and Rock Yo' Taco Queso feed a crowd standing up, Mexican Rice is the side if you want a second pan going, and Spooky Stuffed Peppers is the same seasoning in a costume when the end of October comes round.