Cook Perfect Cannellini Beans Everytime

In addition to outstanding vegetable broth, one of the fundamental components of ribollita is white beans.  Perfect white beans, then, are critical to making this soup taste amazing.  Once your broth and beans are ready, the next step will be to start making ribollita!

            1 cup of dried cannellini beans

            1 quart veg broth

            5 whole garlic cloves

            10 fresh sage leaves

            1 Tbs Olive oil

            Salt and pepper

Clean the beans and remove any stones.  Soak them in the fridge overnight in 3 cups of water.  The next day, take the beans out of the fridge and drain off the soaking water.  Put a heavy bottomed pan on the stove over medium-high heat.  When the pan is warm add the olive oil and ½ teaspoon salt and then add the sage and garlic. Sauté until fragrant, about 30 seconds.  Add in the vegetable broth, a few grinds of fresh black pepper and the soaked beans and bring to a boil.  Boil for two minutes then reduce heat to medium.  Cover, and let simmer till done, monitoring to make sure that the cooking liquid stays just above the beans. If the broth is low, add some hot water to keep the beans covered.  When finished, add salt, if needed, and set aside to cool. 

Delicious Vegetable Broth Made Easy

After yesterday’s post on ribollita, I wanted to follow up with some of the basic recipes I use to recreate the flavor and love built into every dish.  The first critical component is fresh, homemade vegetable broth. 

Basic Vegetable Broth

2 Yellow onions, cut into 1/2” dice

1 mediumCarrot, cut into 1/2” dice

1 stalk of celery, cut into 1/2” dice

10 Mushrooms and their stems, fresh or dried

10 Parsley stems

2 bay leaves

8 whole black peppercorns

Vegetable broth is basically a vegetable tea. Start with cold water, add all the ingredients and turn the stove onto medium high.  Bring the water up to just below a boil and simmer for about twenty minutes and then take off the heat, toss in the parsley stems for ten minutes then and let the broth sit until you need it.  If you are not going to use the broth within a two hours or so, make sure to get it into the fridge as soon as possible once it is cooled off to maximize its storage time.  And remember, you can always freeze extra broth –leave some extra ice trays floating around dedicated for broth.  

As far as the vegetables go, use equivalent amounts of scraps as much as possible – save your onion tops, carrot pieces, mushroom stems and so on.   If you don’t have enough scraps, don’t worry about it – it is worth it to use a whole vegetables since the home made broth is so much better.  Make sure not to add strongly flavored or deeply colored  vegetables.  No broccoli, cauliflower, Brussels sprouts, garlic, beets, or leafy greens. And you will notice that there is no salt added to this broth.  That is by design, to ensure that by adding more liquid in the form of broth to dishes you do not inadvertently add to much salt. 

While many recipes will call for vegetable broth, if you don’t have homemade broth DO NOT USE canned or boxed broth. They are all disgusting. They are worse than just using water since all you will taste is disgusting broth.  Plus, they are generally loaded with salt, giving you no control over how much salt is in the dish in proportion to the broth.  So if you don’t have time to make the broth, don’t worry – just skip it.  Use water instead and throw in a bay leaf and a dried mushroom or two.

Ribolita: Tuscan Bread Soup or My Perfect Food

For reasons that I have never fully understood, nearly 20 years ago I found myself boarding a plane and flying off to live for a time in Florence.  I am not Italian.  I have no strong childhood memories of Italian food or culture.  Even so, ever since that trip, Italy, its language, hills and most of all its food, has had a firm hold on my soul.  Of all the things I lived and learned in Italy – the purity of Tuscan roads by bike, the power of a Renaissance canvas in a darkened church lit only by a single lamp – it is the food that stays with me.  Florence defined food for me, a whole new lexicon of taste that rewrote who I am and how I live.  Before that time I never really tasted food or cooked.  Standing behind my adopted Tuscan Mama, Rina Maschalchi, following her every move, I became a chef.  Among the culinary marvels of that most simple and rustic food, the humblest of them all stands out – ribollita.

My own experience with ribollita began in Signora Maschalchi’s kitchen.  The occasion was a Maschalchi birthday.  Marked with the long table of our often communal meals, a large window that opened onto the nearby piazza, and little else, the kitchen was all spare economy.  A little fridge, a little stove, a little sink, a few cabinets and pots.  Enough for their needs.  

As with many things that we view as Italian food, ribollita is many things to many different people.  At its most basic, ribollita is a concept.  A kind of savory bread pudding based on vegetable soup, white cannellini beans, the intense black kale called cavolo nero, and chunks of saltless pane tipo Toscano. Ribollita is the essence of frugality, the purest expression of “la cucina povera,” the cuisine of poverty, forged out of desperate times with, frankly, desperate ingredients.  The hallmark of ribollita is the ability to take leftovers, what would otherwise be thrown away  – in this case cooked white beans, day-old vegetable soup, stale bread – and make it into something sublime and  stretch it into one more meal.  

Ribollita stirs something primal in Tuscans, it is true soul food and there is little better to mark something as fundamental as a birthday.  Making ribollita takes both time and love, elements lavished with intensity on any proper celebration.  While ribollita may be the ultimate comfort food for Tuscans, it is also symbolic of past deprivations and the modern family with the modern excesses does not need so much as want ribollita. 

On the day of the birthday Rina puts these elements together, the leftover beans, the bread, the love, and distills them into something wholly new.  The irony of ribollita for Tuscans, and for those adopted souls inhabiting their space for a time, is that eating the soup is still a meal in Tuscany.  And that means you eat it with . . . more Tuscan bread.  You eat ribollita with red wine bought from the “farmer” and carried home in a 50 liter vat.  You eat ribollita covered with opaque, almost neon green olive oil that is fresh from another “farmer” and that tastes like grass and the countryside, yet still is identifiably olive.  

The first bite of ribollita is odd.  The texture is smooth, almost silky, and yet still with a density on the tongue that is surprising.   You can taste the coarse vegetal kale, and the creamy beans, and the broth, with a bit of bright tomatoey-ness sneaking through.  The whole is rich and intense, layered with fresh olive oil and balanced by the dark-red intensity of the local wine.  Ribollita tastes like what it is, an amalgam of love and soul and leftovers, little bits of everything sewn together into a vivid tapestry of the perfect food.

Stay tuned.