Soup has been one of my favorite foods for years. I have spent hours mastering the basics of stock and consommé; creating the perfect mixture of onions and tomatoes and green peppers and garlic and cucumbers and so on for gazpacho; determining the right proportions of vegetables, stock and cream for “cream of” soup; and exploring soups from cuisines from around the world.
But my favorite soups have always been bean soups.
And there is nothing better suited to making bean soups than a pressure cooker. Really! So when I got an electric pressure cooker for Christmas a couple of years ago, I started making bean soups on a weekly basis (and sometimes more often). The important thing for me is to have not only a tasty soup, but one that is nutritious, healthy and doesn’t use processed foods (i.e., any food my great grandparents wouldn’t recognize).
However, along the way, life became more complicated, and I had less time to devote to experimenting. So I developed a basic bean soup recipe that can be different every time I make it.
I call it my meat, beans, greens and roots recipe.
1. 2 cups of flavorful crisp base vegetables. This translates to approximately one medium onion, two medium carrots, two celery stalks, four garlic cloves. Substitute something like fennel bulb, celeriac, leeks – anything that will add a flavor to your base.
2. 8 cups water or broth or combination of the two.
3. 1 pound meat. Once again, this can be any kind of meat, ground turkey: bulk sausage, kielbasa, chicken thighs, ground beef, a ham bone, beef shank, ox tail, and on and on.
4. 1 pound dry beans. This can be any kind of bean you like – black beans, black-eyed peas, split peas, lentils, kidney, white, cannelini, navy, garbanzo – you get the picture.
5. Herbs and spices.
6. 2 cups chunked root vegetables. Sweet potatoes, parsnips, butternut squash, Yukon Gold potatoes, turnips, rutabagas, carrots, or any other root vegetable you fancy.
7. 1 pound greens. Spinach, cabbage, collard greens, kale, chard, etc. sliced into ribbons.
Start by sautéing your base vegetables in at least two tablespoons of olive oil (this will prevent the beans from foaming) until they are soft.
If the meat you have selected is on a bone, go to the next step. Otherwise, sauté the meat with your base vegetables until brown.
Add water and beans (no need to soak) to the mix.
Pressure cook on high. Check your pressure cooker’s instructions for how long to cook the unsoaked bean that you have selected. I find that 25 minutes is good for beans like kidneys or navies and 10 minutes for split peas, lentils and black-eyed peas.
Allow pressure to come down naturally.
Remove your pressure cooker lid and add your seasoning. I’m still experimenting with seasoning. I generally use no more than a total of 1 teaspoon dried herbs or 1 tablespoon of fresh herbs per pot of soup. Thyme goes well with split peas, cinnamon, cardamom, mint and allspice go with lentils, cinnamon and cardamom with sweet potatoes, sage with butternut squash, curry or ginger with carrots, basil with white beans, cumin with black beans. Play around with it so that your soup is unique to you.
Add root vegetables. Simmer for about 10 minutes until tender then add your greens. Simmer another 10 minutes until greens are done and serve.
Here are some examples of combinations that I like:
• Ham bone, navy beans, white potatoes and cabbage, seasoned with thyme.
• Kielbasa, black-eyed peas, sweet potatoes and collard greens, seasoned with cumin and oregano
• Linguica, split peas, rutabagas and kale, seasoned with Turkish bay leaves
• Spicy bulk Italian sausage, black beans, butternut squash and Swiss chard, seasoned with allspice and cumin