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Jim Dixon wrote about food for WW for more than 20 years, but these days most of his time is spent at his olive oil-focused specialty food business Wellspent Market. Jim’s always loved to eat, and he encourages his customers to cook by sending them recipes every week through his newsletter. We’re happy to have him back creating some special dishes just for WW readers.
On the food writer’s calendar, soup weather comes right after Labor Day and runs through Spooky Season’s sugary weeks, Thanksgiving’s usual dinner traditions and winter holidays’ spending spree, when all the food is “indulgent,” no matter your faith. This is industry shorthand for “fuck it, eat all the crap you want.” The occasional soup slips in as a good way to use leftovers, or a more healthful alternative to holiday crap.
I make a couple of soups regularly: the chicken soup I wrote about in November 2022 and some kind of bean soup.
One absolute is that you must cook dried beans for soup. Too many recipes equate them with canned beans, and the two are not the same. Canned ones are commodity bush beans, grown mostly for ease of harvest and processing. Even the cheapest dried bulk beans will be infinitely better as long as they’re not too old. Old beans don’t get tender, which is why it’s worth finding local beans. Small farmers rarely profit from them, but they love beans and will usually grow better-tasting varieties.
Better beans—ones with a history of flavor, or bred from an heirloom grown outside their native zone—makes for a better bowl of soup. I cook beans in water with salt and olive oil to make a delicious broth. For this soup, simple aromatics like onion, carrot, celery and jalapeño cook separately in olive oil and go into the soup pot only when the beans are tender.
Recipe
- ½ pound good dried beans
- 6 cups water
- 3 teaspoons kosher-style sea salt
- 1 onion, chopped
- 2 carrots, quartered lengthwise and sliced
- 3 stalks celery, preferably with some leaves, chopped
- 1 jalapeño, chopped, optional
- ¼ cup extra virgin olive oil
- ½ teaspoon pimentón smoked paprika
- ½ teaspoon dried thyme or 3–4 sprigs of fresh, leaves only
- 1-2 teaspoons apple cider or wine vinegar
- Shake of MSG
Combine the beans, water and 2 teaspoons of the salt in a large pot, bring to a boil and simmer until the beans are very tender, 2–3 hours.
In a separate skillet, cook the onion, carrots, celery and jalapeño in olive oil over low heat. Add 1 teaspoon of salt, pimentón and thyme, and simmer until the vegetables are very soft and browned lightly. Remove from the heat and set aside.
When the beans are done, scrape the vegetables with all the oil into the soup pot, adding more water to get your preferred soupy consistency. Taste and add salt as needed, add a shake of MSG and vinegar, and taste again. Let it simmer for another hour or so, and taste it again, adding more salt if needed. Soup is always better the next day, so refrigerate it overnight, then reheat it on the stove if you can. Drizzle more olive oil on each bowl at the table. Grated Parmigiano is very good, but all you really need is a slice of crusty bread, grilled or toasted, maybe garlic-rubbed, but at least oil-drizzled.