Depends whether you consider the noun countable or not. Too many peas, too much mashed potato. It’s purely semantics, I think we can consider refried beans an edge case.

You would use too much, since refried beans is an uncountable noun. You have to add a unit to it to make it countable.

You would say “there’s too much refried beans on my plate, and too many cans of refried beans in the pantry.”

By adding “cans” to the noun phrase, you’ve made the refried beans countable, you may now use “too many.”

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“Excess beanage.”

“Too many” if you’re referring to the beans themselves. “Too much” if you’re referring to refried beans as a dish you have been served.

Edit: just remember: “too many” as reference to a quantity of things, “too much” as reference to a volume or a quantity/amount of a thing. In this case, the “thing” was the dish being served (refried beans). Since it was the dish, itself, being considered (not each individual bean) the phrase was being dealt with, grammatically, as one whole unit— a dish that was served to you, of which you had too much.

Obviously this is very context dependant, but here’s my take:

“I ate too many refried beans” = in one meal, I consumed more refried beans than I should have

“I ate too much refried beans” = over the course of an extended period of time, I ate meals consisting of refried beans more frequently than I should have

I think you’re just going to have to call it “too much refried bean paste”

“This isn’t what I asked for.”

“But… It’s refried beans.”

“Exactly. Beans. I specifically said one refried bean. This is too many refried beans!”

I think it depends on if you view beans as individual beans or not.

Since refried beans is not countable, I vote for “too much”.

Example:

• I’m gassy because I had too much refried beans
• I am gassy because I had too many burritos

Or like someone else suggested, make the noun singular and call them “refried bean paste”. This will probably raise more eyebrows than much/many confusion, though.

“Scrambled eggs” is kind of similar. You could say, “I had too many scrambled eggs” or, “I had too much scrambled egg.”

So I think the correct version is:

“I had too much refried bean.”

You would say “too much mash potato” rather than “too many mash potatoes”, and the consistency is similar

Difference is with “refried beans” the countable noun is plural (“refried beanS” vs “mash potato”).

Saying “too much refried bean” sounds a bit more natural.

When it comes to refried beans, “too many” or “too much” are both incorrect. The correct construction is “may I have some more please?”

Regardless of whether the noun is countable or not, it would typically still be “too much” when referring to how much you’ve eaten.

Consider the scenario where you’ve had only one steak (countable noun), but you had too much steak.

Of course, it’s not always like this. You might say that you had too many cookies for dessert.

It seems like the problem goes away if you add a “the.” I had too much of the refried beans.