Fabada Asturiana rehearsal

We watched a video of Jose Andres with chefs  preparing a Fabada Asturiana and wanted to give this iconic dish a try. At the market, we looked for the (domain-protected) Asturian fabes de la Granja, but the closest we could find were Catalan Mongetes Ganxet. We also found a butcher with a bundle of the meats appropriate for a fabada.  Today's cold, and I didn't think to soak the beans last night, so today I'll treat this as a rehearsal for when I have the correct beans and time to soak them. 

Despite the compromised time and beans, this came out quite well: rich, intense, but not thick and sticky. The beans -- the star of the show -- held together and were creamy with a delicate skin. The sausages were intense. A simple recipe with quality ingredients treated with respect.

Fabada, pan catalana, Basque cider

The Cookful suggests cooking dried beans for about 25 minutes in an Instantpot, but I wanted to be careful with the texture -- I don't want the beans to explode. Here, I'm doing a high-heat fast soak from The Spruce Eats fabada recipe. Ingredients and techniques come from there, plus Saveur, Spanish Sabores, and the Guardian. The recipes, scaled for for 2 people, range from 140 to 300g dried beans, so I'll use 200g. Quantities of the ingredients aren't critical. 

Simple: beans, onion, pimenton, garlic, saffron, oil

Serves 2 hungry shepherds or 3 sedentary adults

200 g      dried Mongetes Ganxet ("crochet beans" due to their curve)

           Olive Oil, Spanish

150 g      small Onion

  1 clove  Garlic, minced

  1 g      Pimenton Dulce

150 g      Tocino (pork belly, slab pancetta)

115 g      Spanish Chorizo (1 link)

120 g      Morcillo (1 link)

pinch      Saffron

 ~4 g      Salt

Put the Beans into a large pot, cover generously with water, bring to boil for 1 minute, then turn off and cover, and let sit for 1 hour.

Meanwhile, cut the Onion into large chunks you can fish out later, then sauté in Olive Oil until soft but not browned. Add the Garlic and Pimenton and sauté a few minutes more to bloom the flavors.

Drain the beans, add back to the large pot with the Tocino, sautéed Onions, Garlic, and Pimenton; add water to cover.

Bring to boil over high heat and skim any scum. 

Reduce to medium, add Saffron and Salt; simmer covered until Beans are slightly al dente in the center; check after an hour, but it might take 90 minutes.

Do not stir as it will break the delicate beans.

Make sure the water just covers the beans, add some if needed.

Remove the Onion.

Add Chorizo and Morcilla, and continue simmering until beans are velvety and cooked through, about 15-45 minutes more; it's OK if a few beans break apart.

Remove the Sausages and Tocino, slice into thick coins.

Adjust Salt. 

Ladle stew into bowls, top with Sausages and Tocino.

Serve with crusty bread and an good quality Asturian, Basque or other Spanish cider. Ours was Basque, and not expensive.

I'd make this again, even with my unsoaked Catalan beans. The chorizo was intensely flavored -- salty, vinegar-y, full of pimenton --  definitely an ingredient rather than something you'd put on a bun. This particular morcilla (blood sausage) was not to our liking: Chris found it too coarse and scary, Irene said it was too heavy on the vinegar; next time I'd seek out a more smooth morcilla. The 1 g of Pimenton was probably not necessary, given how much the chorizo contributed.

2025-05-03 Real beans, higher percentage

At the Sants Mercat Nou, we got the proper beans from Asturias -- they're huge!

A 300 g bag soaked overnight provided 700 g beans.

I'm going to use half of these, since the 200 g dried beans from before fed "2 hungry shepherds".

The beans were still a bit al dente / chalky after 60 minutes plus 30, so next time give them 90 minuets in the first simmer to finish with a creamy texture; but it all depends on what beans you get, and how old they are, etc.

We got a 200 g package of the mixed meats from the store, and that seems a good reduction from the meat-heavy proportions above.

I blitzed the broth-cooked onions with a bit of the broth and added it back to give it some body, and avoid discarding flavor. 

This chorizo was not as pimenton-y nor vinegar-y as the previous, and the morcilla was not as coarse. 

Butifarra con Garbanzos: Pork Sausage with Chickpeas

Butifarra (pork sausage) is omnipresent here in Barcelona, and we're using the basic mild form rather than negre/morcilla (blood), ous (egg), or other forms. Chickpeas are also super popular, like the many forms of beans and legumes. We've got plenty of both on hand, so wanted a dinner that combines these, not necessarily together in a stew, but as complements. 

I'm taking ideas from José Andrés "Tapas: A Taste of Spain in America": Moorish-style chickpea and spinach stew, and Butifarra amb Mongets del Ganxet "Daniel Patrick Moynihan" (so "inside the Beltway"!); and Penelope Casas "¡Delicioso! The Regional Cooking of Spain" recipe Espinacas con Garbanzos a la Sevillana. Chickpeas combine synergistically with spinach: earthy, rich, and much more tasty than it sounds; it's a classic dish here, and there are many variants, including ones with bacalao around the holidays.

Irene cooked up a mountain of dried chickpeas in the Instant Pot: it makes fast work of the beans, so I'm using her pre-cooked beans and some of the left over cooking liquid here. 

Serves 2

 35 ml     Olive Oil (2 Tbs)
  2        Butifarra (225 g total)

  3 clove  Garlic

250 g      Chickpeas, cooked
 80 ml     Chickpea cooking water

  1 slice  White Bread, 1 cm thick, crust removed
  1 Tbs    Sweet Pimentón
  1 Tbs    Spanish Sherry Vinegar
250 g      Spinach, chopped
  1 g      Cumin, ground (1/2 tsp)

  1 g      Rosemary, fresh, minced (or 0.5 g dried)
to taste   Salt
to taste   White Pepper

Sauté Garlic and Butifarra in Olive Oil; when the Garlic is lightly browned, about 3 minutes, remove and reserve; continue the Butifarra until cooked, 8-10 minutes total; reserve.

Brown the Bread on both sides, a couple minutes each; remove.
Let the pan cool then add the Pimentón, then Sherry Vinegar to prevent Pimentón from burning; remove pan from heat.
Smash the Garlic and toasted Bread in a mortar to make a thick paste.

Add the Chickpeas, Chickpea cooking liquid, and Spinach to the pan and simmer to lightly cook the Spinach, about 5 minutes.
Add the Garlic/Bread paste, it should be a thick stewy sauce.

Season to taste with Salt and Pepper

Add more Chickpea Liquid if it's getting too dry.

Reduce heat to low; place the cooked Sausage next to the stew to warm it through and let the flavors combine, 5-10 more minutes.

Plate the Sausage then ladle the Chickpeas stew next to it.

Potaje de Vigilia: Easter stew of chickpeas, spinach, bacalao

We've been immersing ourselves in the seasonal foods in Barcelona, and Easter Week (semana santa) is a big deal here with its own foods.  Despite being a food of abstinence (vigilia), this is rich and the flavor is well more than the sum of ingredients. It's not hard to make, and you could substitute ham for the bacalao to provide the salty umami, or omit the egg and bacalao if you wanted a vegan version.  Claudia Rodan's recipe doesn't use the bacalao in her recipe; I'm basing mine on Emma Garcia's which uses a "majado" of breadcrumbs, egg, and oil to provide body and flavor.

Garbanzos, Spinach, Bacalao, garnished with chopped Egg Whites

Measurements are approximate, I'm aiming for a something thicker than a soup, almost a stew. 

This makes 4 dinner portions.

240 g      Bacalao, hydrated over two nights, changing water

240 g      Garbanzo beans, dried; rehydrate overnight

  2 whole  Cloves

  2        Bay Leaves

           Olive Oil, for frying

  2 clove  Garlic, sliced

  2 slices Bread

  2        Eggs

           Extra Virgin Olive Oil, for majado

200 g      Onion (or Leek), chopped

130 g      Tomato, chopped

300 ml     Fish Stock

big pinch  Pimentón Dulce

300 g      Spinach, fresh

Soak the salted, dried Bacalao in water overnight; change the water, soak again overnight, drain. If it's still stiff and too salty, soak bit more, but you'll be cooking it and don't want to leach all the salt funk from the fish.

Soak the dried Garbanzo beans overnight in plenty of water. Drain and leave in the fridge until you're ready. You could use cooked canned or jarred garbanzos too: use about 450 g pre-cooked garbanzos.

Cook the Garbanzos covered in water with the Cloves and Bay Leaf, some Salt and Pepper, and with any aromatics you have around -- a carrot, celery stalk, onion, etc. This should take about 90-120 minutes, covered, on a lazy simmer.

Add some Olive Oil to a skillet and sauté the Garlic; reserve.
Add the bread and toast in the Olive Oil on both sides until a bit crunchy and toasted; you might want to weight it down to make good contact; reserve. Don't clean the skillet, you'll use it again in a minute.

Boil the eggs: add to cold water, bring to boil, turn off, cover, and let sit 10 minutes. Peel and separate yolks from whites, keep both. 

In a blender or food processor, blitz the toasted bread with two egg yolks and some nice Extra Virgin Olive Oil. This makes a "majado" -- kinda like a panade -- which will thicken the sauce and add depth of flavor. Reserve.

The blitzed majado

Add some more Olive Oil to the skillet and sauté the Onions until soft and a bit golden, add then the Tomato, and cook until soft. Blitz in blender or food processor with the Fish Stock and Pimentón to get a smooth texture. 

When cooked, drain the Garbanzos and collect the cooking liquid; toss the aromatics.

Add the Garbanzos and Garlic back to the pot with the smooth Onion Tomato Stock. 

Add the Majado for body and flavor.

Add the Spinach and stir to cook, and let it reduce down.

If it's too thick for your liking, add the bean cooking liquid until you get the texture you prefer; you could thin it with more Fish Stock too, if needed.

Cut up the rehydrated Bacalao and add to the potage, and let it cook through a few minutes.

Check seasoning for Salt and Pepper.

Serve in bowls, garnished with chopped Egg Whites.

Cassoulet

We've been making Cassoulet since 1996 with various complicated French recipes, and even took a class at L'Academie de Cuisine. It's a great, rich, hearty, cold-weather bean and meat stew from southern France. We've even made a pilgrimage to Castelnaudry which claims to have invented the dish; indeed, the fields all around the town are planted with the white beans that comprise the base. Now we're not so fussy, especially after seeing L'Academie's chef-owner wasn't even following his own recipe. We always used to start with a 2-pound bag of white beans, but it makes a ton of rich stew; here, we're cutting back to 1 pound dried beans to start: it still makes 6-8 portions.

The basic idea is to cook the rehydrated beans in a rich, flavorful stock, then combine with garlic-y sausage and duck confit; some recipes have you layer them, others have you combine at service; it's OK to just combine when you're finishing in the oven.  Most recipes suggest adding breadcrumbs and fat while finishing in the oven and this gives a wonderfully crunchy crust.

We make duck confit with a simple sous vide technique; it's so easy there's no reason not to have this simple luxury.

Ingredients

• 1 pound Beans, dry, white, northern or flageolets (2 Cups)
• 4 Cup Stock
• 1/2 pound Bacon, slab
• 1 Carrot, cut into thirds
• 1 Onion, halved, stuck with the Clove
• 1 Clove
• 1 Bouquet Garni
• 1 Tbs Salt
• 2 piece Duck Confit (legs), prepared earlier
• 1 Sausage, garlic or lamb, cut into coins
• 2 Onions, finely chopped
• 3 clove Garlic, chopped
• 1 Tomatoes, peeled, seeded, chopped bean-size (or 2 Cups canned)
• 1/2 Cup Breadcrumbs
• 1/4 Cup Duck Fat from the Confit

Beans

Soak Beans in 3x amount of cold water for 12 hours. If after 6 hours water is cloudy, change it. Drain. Rinse the Beans and place in large heavy-bottomed pan. Cover with cold water and bring to boil. Reduce heat and simmer for 5 minutes. Drain. Return Beans to the pot and add 4 Cups Stock. Add Salt, Bacon, Carrot, Clove-studded Onion, and Bouquet Garni. Bring to boil and simmer for about 1 hour, until beans are almost tender. Do not stir while cooking.

Meat and Veg

Meanwhile...

In saute pan, brown the Sausage; you can also brown the Duck, skin side down, or pull the skin and crisp it separately, adding the cooked Duck Confit in later. Season with salt and pepper and set aside. In the same pan, sweat the finely chopped Onions in butter until soft and translucent. Add the chopped garlic, tomatoes, and 1/2 C of the cooking liquid from beans. Cook covered for 5 minutes; if drying out, add some stock.

Assembly

When the beans are almost tender, remove Carrot, Onion, Bacon, Bouquet Garni; Beans should be still quite wet, lots of liquid remains; this is necessary. 

Add the Onion/Tomato mixture, Sausage, Duck meat pulled from the bones. 

Check the seasoning of the Beans; some cooking liquid should remain.

In a large oven-proof casserole, layer or simply combine the meats and beans with their liquid. Sprinkle with Breadcrumbs and pour 1/2 Cup Duck Fat over the crumbs. Bake covered at 325F for 2 hours. Uncover 20 minutes before done to brown the Breadcrumbs.

2012-02-26 Dry Beans

We didn't have hydrated or soaked beans so use a pressure cooker to expedite the cooking -- we wanted cassoulet tonight, dammit! We used 2 pounds dry Great Northern Beans (about 5 Cups), 15 Cups water, 6 Tbs Oil (to prevent foaming), and included Bacon Rind, Carrot, Onion. Pressure cooked at 15 PSI for 20 minutes, and the beans came out done -- done enough to eat, but a little too done for further cooking. Since our beans were wet and finished, we cut back from 8 Cup Stock to 5 Cups. We baked uncovered so we didn't cook any more than necessary. Here too we used duck confit made directly by sous vide method. Next time, for 2 pounds (5 cups), cut back to 12 cups water and 15 minutes pressure cooking.

Daily Dinner #2

Shannon challenged us to post our regular, day-to-day dinners. We'll try and do them in weekly batches. 

This week was a bit unusual as we had colleagues staying with us to work on a big software project, so we went out more than we normally would. 

2015-07-19 Sunday

We brined an Amish chicken from the market in a 3% solution (e.g., 1 Liter water to 30 g kosher salt) overnight. The brine keeps it moist, seasons it, and the breast bones keep the heat from drying out the meat. We cut out the spine so we can "spatchcock" it, allowing us to lay it flat over the coals. We also remove the wing tips for stock, and reserve the wings and drummettes to make Buffalo style chicken wings sometime in the future. 

We took the brined chicken out the next day, drained it, then let it sit in the fridge to dry out the skin a bit. I painted it with olive oil, salt, pepper, garlic powder, and paprika, and repeated this once on the fire. 

Cook it skin side up, breast bones down, until done all the way through. The dark meat gets a bit closer to the heat, the white meat is well protected, so they get done to the right temperatures about the same time; you want the dark meat cooked to a higher temperature than the white meat. When cooked through, I turned it upside down to crisp up the skin a bit.  In the background, we have some garden cherry tomatoes heating through.

Once off the grill, we divide the chicken up into the constituent pieces: separate the legs from the breasts and divide into drumstick and thigh; cut the breast down the center, then divide into front and back portions. 

We served the chicken on a bed of arugula, radicchio, sorrel and oak leaf lettuce that's coming into its own in the garden. 

Irene made a potato salad from new potatoes we picked up at the farmers market, dressed with mayonnaise liberated from various lunch counters, capers, horseradish, vinegar, oil, chives, spring onions, and mint from the garden.

This turned out very well, the brine allowed us some leeway in our cooking, but kept it moist and flavorful. I couldn't get as much crunch as I'd like in the skin, I think I let the coals die down too much. 

The wine was from Chateau Costco, a Marlborough sauvignon blanc that was quite decent for the price. The blue glasses have fizzy water we make, adding a bit of epsom salts to our tap water to get a mineral profile similar to that of Apollinaris, then force carbonate with gear I used to use for homebrewing.

2015-07-20 Monday

Irene was cooking crawfish and grits so Chris decided to do a New Orleans cocktail, the classic Sazerac. We went old school, with brandy instead of the modern rye, and used pre-post-prohibition Absinthe we brought from Spain (the real spirit containing wormwood was illegal in most countries, including the U.S. at the time, the modern stuff eschews wormwood), and Peychaud's bitters from New Orleans, muddled with a sugar cube.  It has the class of a Manhattan but a bit sweeter, with the distinctive Absinthe aroma. A great cocktail! 

Sauté the onions and garlic with thyme, add garden tomatillos, cook down to release a bit of liquid.

Then add crayfish/crawdads/mudbugs and cook through. Season with some vinegar-based hot sauce to taste. 

We served it with leftover grits, plumped with the corn we got from the farmers market this weekend.

I get a kick out of a nicely laid-out table, including old-school napkin presentation. 

2015-07-21 Tuesday

Hot days call for a Caipirinha, the Brazilian cocktail featuring Cachaça; I prefer the assertiveness of Pitu brand over the dainty smooth ones. We're a bit heavy-handed and use 3 ounces Cachaça, two tablespoons of Sugar, and one lime per person.  

Muddle limes with sugar to extract flavor from the skins, add the booze, shake on ice, strain, serve. 

We made some chorizo from pork loin we'd cold smoked. The smell and taste were great but the lean meat didn't have quite the right texture. We cooked 'em up with new potatoes, leveraging the fat that came off the sausages.

We served these with roma beans from the garden, steamed then sautéed with a bit of the fat left in the skillet.

2015-07-22 Wednesday

We don't go to Cowboy Cafe every Wednesday for 50-cent wings, but we've got geeks over to sprint on a big software project, so beer and wings seemed like just the right thing for a late dinner. These are the Edgar-style wings, with a great crusty exterior.

 Don't forget to eat your vegetables.

2015-07-24 Thursday

Irene picked up some quality ribeye steaks from Costco while the geeks toiled in the basement. While we were prepping dinner, I made a variation on a Manhattan with Temtation bourbon, Vya Vermouth (flavorful, full-bodied, from California), and a homemade maraschino-style cherry. 

Irene built a big fire (hardwood charcoal, of course). We dropped the grates as low as we could to get an intense sear, and when they were nearly done, moved them well off the heat to rest before cutting them up.

We also grilled up some garden zucchini and bush beans, mushrooms, and grilled some of my bread.

Left to right, Charles, Earl, Reed, and Irene, finally getting dinner at 10pm.

2015-07-24 Friday

The gang's still here, hacking code til late, so we ran out to the Lebanese Tavern. It was a really pleasant night so we were able to sit outside.  We started with some interesting cocktails (Beirut Mule, with Arak instead of Vodka), with some freshly made and delicious pita.  Entres were rare lamb, well roasted lamb, and roasted chicken. I stupidly forgot to take pictures, the rare lamb was gorgeous. Roasted lamb, from a Yelp posting:

We then stayed up way too late drinking through a bunch nice booze: Temptation bourbon and Redemption rye, smooth Jura and smoky Bowmore single malt whisky.

2015-07-25 Saturday

We continued to work straight through dinner time, then went out to Janet's rooftop party on Capitol Hill. Irene made phyllo pastry stuffed with arugula pesto -- crunchy and rich from the butter and filling. Below, they're chilling before baking.

It was a perfect night, with killer views. The U.S. Capitol's undergoing renovation and the scaffolding makes it look pixelated, like it's built from legos.