Seven soups to simmer in December
From make-it-with-your-eyes-closed to major project, soup vibes are big this month. Plus a big clay pot of incredible vegan frijoles de olla.
Happy Friday, cozy cook, and happy December!
Since we’re coming into high soup season, a roundup of some delicious pots to simmer sounds glorious. It’s so funny, when I posted the photo above — a Persian Chicken Soup with Chickpea and Lamb Meatballs (Abgusht-e morgh ba kufteh-ye nokhodchi) — the aromas seemed to jump from the photo. It’s from one of my all-time favorite cookbooks — Feast of Life, by Najmieh Batmanglij. More on that presently.
Holiday gifts for cooks
Before we dive into the big soup pot, you might want to know that the annual Holiday Pop-Up Shop at Cooks Without Borders is open!
There you can find some of my favorite cooking tools, ingredients and books. And a pot — the first item in the shop, a handmade clay bean pot from the Valley of Tehuacan in central Mexico. I bought one a couple years ago, and it’s one of my prized possessions.
I love the way it looks and feels so much that I keep it displayed on a shelf in my living room. 😂
But it spends a lot of time in the kitchen (it’s lead-free), as we are big bean eaters in our house. You can actually put it directly on a gas stove, over a gentle flame. I made a pot of heirloom mayocoba beans in mine a couple days ago — so incredibly good. Both the beans ($6.25/pound) and the pot ($75) are in the pop-up shop, via Rancho Gordo. [Note: CWB has an affiliate relationship with Bookshop.org, Amazon and ThermoWorks, but not with others, such as Rancho Gordo and Capay Mills, which I link to as a reader service because I love them .]
I almost buried the lede: Though the bean pot is frequently sold out, I just checked (yep, through the link in the pop-up shop), and Rancho Gordo has it in stock right now! If’ you want one, I suggest you don’t wait to grab. You can stock up on beans at the same time.
Here’s how I make those beans in that pot:
Clay-Pot Vegan Frijoles de Olla
No need to soak. I love including dried avocado leaves, which add a kind of haunting, vaguely licoricey note, but they’re not always easy to find. Masienda sells fabulous ones (also in the pop-up shop sometimes), but they’re currently out of stock. Sometimes you can find avocado leaves of not-as-fabulous quality and WAY less expensive at Mexican supermarkets, sold in small cellophane bags with other dried herbs. You can also throw in some fresh epazote, if you happen to have some; I like to do that once the beans have been cooking a few minutes. But I don’t often have it, and I don’t miss it; these beans are always wonderful, even when done very plain. You’ll probably need to add boiling water to the pot a couple of times, so it’s useful to keep the kettle filled.
Ingredients
• 1 pound/half-kilo of dried mayocoba, flor de mayo or bayo beans
• A couple tablespoons of olive oil (no need to measure)
• A few slices of onion (white or yellow)
• A few peeled and lightly smashed garlic cloves (2 or 3 is fine)
• A few dried avocado leaves, if you have them (don’t worry if you don’t)
• Sea salt
Instructions
• Rinse the beans (a pound/half-kilo, or more or less as you like), discarding any that are broken or shriveled as well as any little stones you might find. I’ve never found a little stone in beans, but someone must have at some point, because we always say that.
• Fill a kettle and set it to boil. Have it ready when you start. Put the olive oil in the bean pot, set it over a low flame, and heat it till the oil is warm. Turn up the heat to medium-low and when the oil is hot-ish, throw in the onion, garlic and avocado leaves (if you’re using them). Stirring now and then, cook the onion till you can start to smell it and it starts to soften.
• Add the beans, plus boiling water to cover by an inch or two, and stir. Add about a half teaspoon of salt. (I keep a giant jar of coarse sea salt from Guérand for things like this - find it at the pop-up shop. Think salting at this point is a bad idea? Read this.) Bring back to a boil; at this point, you can turn up the heat to medium, as long as your medium flame isn’t too big. (The whole thing with this pot is you don’t want to expose it to a sudden radical change in temp. For me, slow, gradual heating has always been fine.) Bring the water to a low simmer. The pot comes with a small bowl that can be used as a cover; I usually cover it at this point for a bit.
• Simmer the beans until they’re nearly done, adding boiling water as necessary to keep them well covered. Partly you want enough cooking liquid, but also you’ll want to wind up with some delicious broth to enjoy with the beans. Mayocobas cook relatively quickly; sometimes they’re done after about an hour and 15 minutes of simmering, sometimes it takes a little longer. It could be more than two hours, though — it just depends on the particular beans, and (apparently) how fresh they are.
• The beans are done when they’re meltingly soft. When they’re nearly there, add more salt — maybe a couple of teaspoons. Salt them to deliciousness, but unless you’re going to eat them pretty quickly, without repeated re-heatings (which will make them saltier as water evaporates), you might hold back a little.
Enjoy! These are wonderful eaten in a small bowl with some of the broth. If you always thought pork was necessary for delicious beans, I think you’ll see things differently once you try these.
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Soup’s on!
Here are the soups that sound enticing right this month:
Shrimp, Andouille Sausage and Okra Gumbo
Last chance for dishes involving okra, as the crop ends with the first freeze. This gumbo is one of my favorite ways to enjoy it. Is gumbo a soup or a stew? That’s up to you to decide — I just want to eat it.
Classic Split Pea
One of the easiest, least labor-intensive soups in the universe to make is also one of the most soul-soothing. I think I’ll make some this weekend.
Miso Soup
Also ridiculously easy, and made in five minutes, once you have dashi — which you can make in about 15. Keep dashi in the freezer if you want to be able to make miso soup at the drop of a hat.
Persian Chicken Soup with Chickpea and Lamb Meatballs
Here’s the elaborate soup pictured at the top of this post: abgusht-e morgh ba kufteh-ye nokhodchi. It’s honestly one of the most deliciously transporting things every to come out of my kitchen. Yes, those are rose petals on top,
Joan’s Chicken Soup
No rose petals in my mom’s Ashkenazi-Jewish-style chicken soup, but it’s really good, and easy to achieve.
Tom Kha Kai (Coconut-Galangal Chicken Soup)
Yet another chicken soup — this one by way of Leela Punyaratabandhu’s Simple Thai Food. If you have access to makrut lime leaves, lemongrass and galangal (do you leave near a Thai market?), it’s astoundingly simple to put together.
Roasted Cauliflower Soup with Harissa
The technique her is also super simple: Roast cauliflower, simmer briefly in broth (vegetable or leek broth if you want it vegan, chicken if not), purée with a stick blender and add a swirl of harissa.
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Oh, and that reminds me: earlier this month, I wrote a story about how to make your own Tunisian-style harissa. (Paid subscribers got the recipe early, while I was working on the story — in case you want to upgrade, that’s the kind of behind-the-scenes stuff you’ll get.)
And here’s a related new story (with recipes) about couscous:
Did I mention that a paid subscription to this newsletter makes an excellent holiday gift, for yourself or a cook you love?
Have a marvelous month. Simmer up something special this weekend!
Lots of love,
Leslie