Minestrone PET

[Mikey]

This isn't one that I made up, but an authentic Italian minestrone from Marcella Hazan's "Essentials of Italian Cooking." There's no meat in it, almost vegetarian, except for a few Tbs of butter, some Parmesan cheese and chicken stock (the recipe calls for homemade "meat" stock but I just use chicken bone broth from Costco). It took me a while before I tried this because at first glance it doesn't seem all that substantial, but it packs a whole bunch of flavor into a bowl, enough to make it a main course for a light dinner with some crusty bread and maybe a salad, or a side for some kind of protein. I sometimes serve it with some grilled salmon fillet. There are a few somewhat surprising ingredients (like the cabbage - I don't know where to get Savoy cabbage so I just use regular), and the chunk of Parmesan rind. But it's become a staple here over the past year or so. I've added a couple of extra ingredients at the end, which aren't necessary but I think that they add a little extra interest.

I copied the recipe right out of the book here with a couple of my notes on measurements, but you can also find it easily on the interwebs on dozens of websites.






The recipe calls for a whole bunch of different veggies, chopped up pretty fine, added in a certain order. It also says that as one veggie is sautéing you can chop up the next one. Marcella must have been a lot better with a knife than I am because each one of these takes quite a bit more than 2 or 3 minutes to chop, so I get most of them ready in advance. I never heard of using cabbage in minestrone, but you don't even see it after cooking down for a couple of hours.

But first, the beans. The recipe says you can use canned cannellini beans but I prefer to get the dried "Marcella" beans (named for the author of this recipe because they were her favorite beans) from Rancho Gordo. Check out their website if you're interested in trying a whole lot of different types of beans. I soak them for four hours and then set them up to simmer for a little over an hour with some EVOO and aromatics while I'm doing the rest. These cooked beans are also pretty awesome just by themselves.







Once the beans are going I start chopping the veggies.




It starts, like a lot of classic recipes from many cuisines, with the combination of onions, carrots and celery. Mirepoix in France. Soffritto in Italy.
Cajun cooking has a "holy trinity" that's onions, celery and bell peppers. In Spanish and Latino cooking it might include garlic and tomatoes. I'm not sure how much difference it makes what order these are added in because it ends up cooking for several hours, but I do follow the suggested sequence. I chop the zucchini while the other stuff is cooking. Also, I use small red and Yukon Gold potatoes, and I don’t peel them.

Here's the soffritto after the onions have cooked for a few minutes:




This is after all the fresh veggies have been added:




Next goes the broth, canned tomatoes (diced tomatoes from Costco) and Parmesan rind.






I get a big chunk of imported Parmesan from Costco (it's a really good deal there) and remove the rind. The rest is for grating. Although this is an "optional" ingredient, it add a whole lot of depth to the final flavor. I used to think that you use the rind because it would be thrown away otherwise, but it turns out the there's a lot of flavor packed in there, which cooks out into the soup.




After simmering for about an hour I put in my additional (optional) ingredients - some torn up Tuscan kale and some wild chanterelle mushrooms.




After about 2 1/2 hours I add the cooked beans, which now look like this:




Another 30 minutes and you have the final product, easily stored in two-serving containers. We had some for dinner on Saturday while in Tune Town. Forgot to take pictures of it in an bowl, but I might do that tonight as I'm cooking up something else to go with it.

[Roux]

Hell yes! Rack the PET.

[HighPlainsGrifter]

This sounds terrific.

[mvscal]

But first, the beans. The recipe says you can use canned cannellini beans but I prefer to get the dried "Marcella" beans (named for the author of this recipe because they were her favorite beans) from Rancho Gordo. Check out their website if you're interested in trying a whole lot of different types of beans. I soak them for four hours and then set them up to simmer for a little over an hour with some EVOO and aromatics while I'm doing the rest. These cooked beans are also pretty awesome just by themselves.

They look like cannellini beans to me. I will swear by Camellia brand. Always fresh. Maybe one or two bad beans in a package. Their red kidneys are a must for proper red beans and rice.

[Mikey]

They look like cannellini beans to me.

They are.

[mvscal]

They look like cannellini beans to me.

They are.

That doesn't look like Marcella Hazan.

How much evoo did you use? That doesn't look like nearly enough. Beans love fat. You can't get creamy beans without it.

[Mikey]

They look like cannellini beans to me.

They are.

That doesn't look like Marcella Hazan.

How much evoo did you use? That doesn't look like nearly enough. Beans love fat. You can't get creamy beans without it.

That's not her, obviously. You can find the story on the Rancho Gordo website. Apparently she had a favorite variety of cannellini beans that come from the area in Italy where she grew up, but could never find them in the US. The guy who started Rancho Gordo found a source for the heirloom seeds and started growing them in NoCal, wherever Rancho Gordo is (Napa County I think). When he finally got enough growing to where he could start marketing them, she had recently passed. So he contacted her husband and asked if it would be OK for him to use her name on the beans and was given permission to put her name on them. Kind of a cool story, actually. Any other cannellini bean would work find in this, I just wouldn't use the canned stuff when I can cook my own the way I want to. The recipe actually calls for "white kidney beans."

When I pre-cook the beans, depending on what I'm using them for, I usually sauté some onion and/or shallots in about 1/4 or 1/3 cup of EVOO. Then add the beans and water and, often, a bay leaf. No salt until they're almost done. They get added into the soup in the final 30 minutes. There's quite a bit of EVOO (and some butter) in the main soup mix. The beans don't need to be really creamy here because all of the other stuff cooks down, intentionally, to where you can hardly tell the individual components apart. And you don't use the bean broth in this recipe.

My most recent concoction was a soup (more like stew) using a combination of Rancho Gordo's Santa Maria pinquitos and "eye of the goat" (ojo de cabra). These were added to a soup made from a lot of the same vegetables, plus about half a dozen heirloom tomatoes that were approaching the end of their counter time, cooked down with a large ham shank. I cooked the beans separately from the other components, and made sure that they were well cooked and very creamy. The bean broth definitely went in with this one. A little sage and a little thyme for flavor. I usually add some red pepper flakes, and maybe some smoked paprika to my bowl. Mrs. Mikey wouldn't eat it if those were added to her portion.

[Mikey]

I'm going to have to check out the Camelia beans. I'm not tied to Rancho Gordo, but they do have some really interesting heirloom varieties. Our local grocer used to carry at least a dozen types of beans and lentils in bulk bins, but for some reason stopped doing it. Now they just have pinto beans in bulk and some others on the shelf in generic packaging. I only started getting into the bean thing during the pandemic and realized that there are a lot of awesome ways to use them. The Rancho Gordo beans are somewhat more expensive, but still a pretty good deal compared to other foods for what you can get out of them.

They have a large white bean called Royal Corona, which is great in a tuna and white bean salad. The Macella beans are a relatively small cannellini.

[mvscal]

That is an interesting story. I will have to check them out. Pinquito beans are a key ingredient for a Santa Maria cookout and difficult to find.

The missus and I have been doing the Mediterranean thing and beans are a big part of that, chickpeas especially.

Have you done falafel?