Everyone says beans and rice is boring, but my $6 pot at the trailer park proved them wrong
Made a big pot of pinto beans with a ham hock at my place off Route 9 in August, and the gas went out halfway through so I finished them on a $20 hot plate I keep for camping. Turned out better than any slow simmer I ever did, and the whole pot fed me for 5 days on about $6 total. People keep telling me to add sausage or bacon for flavor but honestly the onion and a bay leaf did the work, has anyone else had a cheap cut come out better when the heat was lower than you planned?
Are you sure that pot was actually better, or did it just seem that way because you were hungry and stuck with no gas? Here is the thing nobody wants to hear: low heat on a hot plate is not magic, it is just uneven heat, and beans are forgiving enough that they will cover for you. If you had done a real side by side with the same beans and the same ham hock, I bet the slow simmer wins and the hot plate batch just got lucky. A bay leaf and an onion are fine, but saying they "did the work" is a stretch, the ham hock did the heavy lifting and you know it. Five days off one pot also means you were eating the same thing all week, which makes day one taste a lot better in your memory than it really was.