Yes, I intended to serve it as a soup. With crusty bread. But, unfortunately, we were out of homebaked crusty bread and we ended up eating the soup with rice. It was great! Soup as main course paired with rice is very common in Asia after all.
But what’s so special about this soup? Well, apart from being delicious, of course. The first is a little trick I tried to get softer and creamier beans. The second is the ease in the overall preparation of the dish.
When cooking stews and soups with beans, the best choice is to use dried beans. As they soften in the cooking liquid, they absorb all the flavors they come into contact with. That includes salt, herbs and spices.
The problem with dried beans is that they take so long to cook. There was a time when I cooked them with pork hock, a tough cut that requires long and slow cooking, and the meat reached the fall-off-the-bone stage while the beans were still not tender enough. And I ended up overcooking the pork hock until the beans were acceptably soft.
So, having dealt with that difficulty, when I cooked anything that included beans among the ingredients, the default became canned beans. They’re already cooked to perfection and all they need is to get coated with the flavors of the other ingredients. Fast and convenient.
The trouble with canned beans is that precisely because they are already cooked, it isn’t advisable to cook them for much longer. Otherwise, the beans just fall apart and get mixed into the cooking liquid. When that happens, it’s hard to find whole beans in the finished dish.
The other disadvantage is that canned beans are not very good at soaking up the flavors of the cooking liquid. They’re fully cooked and often already seasoned. You have to get creative so that whatever seasonings (and, occasionally, sauce) come with the beans blend with the rest of the ingredients in the dish you’re cooking.
So, given those two serious disadvantages, I decided to give dried beans a second chance. I read a tip somewhere that soaking them in water with a little baking soda not only makes them cook faster but gives them a creamier texture too. The full process is detailed in the recipe below but just to show you how my dried beans turned out…
The beans and ox tripe were in the slow cooker for 10 hours. Two hours on HIGH and eight hours on LOW. After four hours, the beans were already soft but the tripe, of course, was still too tough to eat. I was worried that the beans would disintegrate if cooked longer, and I did entertain the idea of separating them from the tripe, but it was midnight and the thought of making a mess in the kitchen after we had already cleaned up for the day wasn’t pleasant at all. So, I left them in the slow cooker and let them cook with the tripe longer. The beans softened some more but, surprisingly, they held their shape.
The rest of the cooking process happened in a pan on the stovetop. Roughly chopped onion and small cubes of carrot were sauteed in a little olive oil. Sliced sausages and a heap of sundried tomatoes were added and everything was tossed together until the sausages started to render fat.
Diced bell peppers went in next and cooking continued until the vegetables softened considerably. The cooked tripe and beans were poured in along with the cooking liquid. Seasonings were added to make sure that the soup wouldn’t taste flat and bland. When the mixture reached boiling point, the heat was set to LOW and everything simmered together for somewhere between 10 to 15 minutes.
Equipment
- Slow cooker
Ingredients
Beans
- 1 ½ cups dried white beans
- ¾ teaspoon baking soda
Beef (ox) tripe
- 500 grams beef (ox) tripe honeycomb or blanket
- 1 tablespoon vinegar
- 2 onions peeled
- 1 head garlic (that's one whole bulb, not one clove)
- 2 bay leaves
- salt
- cracked black pepper
To complete the soup
- 2 tablespoons olive oil
- 1 onion peeled and roughly chopped
- 1 carrot peeled and cut into half-inch cubes
- 200 grams spicy sausages cut into thick rings (see notes)
- 1 heaping tablespoon sundried tomato strips
- 4 bell peppers deseeded and diced
- salt
- pepper
Instructions
Soak the beans
- Rinse beans well, drain and place in a large bowl.
- Stir the baking soda with four cups of water and pour over the beans. Leave to soak for about 15 minutes.
Parboil the tripe
- Rinse the tripe and place in a sauce pan.
- Cover with water and pour in the vinegar.
- Boil hard for ten minutes then drain (see notes).
Slow cook the tripe and beans
- Transfer the tripe to the slow cooker.
- Drain the beans, rinse several times, drain again and add to the tripe.
- Drop in the whole onions, garlic, bay leaves, a tablespoon of salt and half a teaspoon of pepper.
- Pour in enough water to cover the solid ingredients by two inches.
- Set the cooker to HIGH for two hours then switch to LOW and cook for another eight hours.
- When done, fish out the whole onions, garlic and bay leaves, and discard.
Cook the soup
- Heat the olive oil in a large pan.
- Saute the chopped onion and carrot cubes for a minute.
- Add the sausages and sundried tomato strips, and cook, tossing, until fat is visibly rendered.
- Add the bell peppers and cook, stirring, for about two minutes.
- Pour in the cooked tripe and beans with the cooking liquid.
- Stir and taste the broth and add more salt and pepper, if needed.
- Once boiling, lower the heat, cover the pan and simmer for 10 to 15 minutes.
- Taste the broth once more and adjust the seasonings, if needed, before serving.
