Just made this. It reminds me of Campbell's bean with bacon soup - an elevated version.
From the Dads Cook Dinner blog
Ingredients
- 1 pound dried navy beans, sorted and rinsed
- 2 tablespoons butter
- 1 large onion, cut into 1/2 inch dice
- 2 cloves garlic, sliced
- 1/2 teaspoon Kosher salt
- 1 1/2 pounds smoked ham hocks (or a hambone and some leftover ham) (I didn't have a ham hock so I used chopped ham. I think the smoked hock would taste better, but it worked)
- 8 cups water
- 1 teaspoon fresh ground black pepper
- Salt to taste
- Minced parsley for garnish
- (I added chopped carrots and 2 tsp of chicken soup base)
Instructions
- Sort and rinse the beans: Sort the navy beans, removing broken beans, stones, or dirt clods. Rinse the beans and set aside.
- Saute the aromatics: Heat the butter in the pressure cooker pot over medium-high heat until it stops foaming. Add the onion, garlic, and 1/2 teaspoon salt. Saute until the onions are softened and browning around the edges, about 8 minutes.
- Pressure cook the beans: Stir the rinsed navy beans into the pressure cooker. Set the ham hocks on top of the beans, and then pour the 8 cups of water over everything. Lock the lid on the pressure cooker, and cook at high pressure for 30 minutes in an electric PC, or 26 minutes in a stovetop PC. Let the pressure release naturally, about 20 minutes. Remove the lid carefully, opening away from you – even when it’s not under pressure, the steam in the cooker is very hot.
- Shred the ham hock, season, and serve: Remove the ham hock from the pot with a slotted spoon or tongs, and set aside to cool. When the ham is cool enough to handle, shred it, then stir the ham back into the pot. Stir in the fresh ground black pepper. Now, taste the soup, and add salt until the soup tastes sweet and full of body, and you can just feel the taste of salt on the tip of your tongue. (I needed 2 teaspoons of kosher salt to get the taste I wanted.) Serve with a sprinkle of minced parsley on each bowl.
Notes
- Want to speed up the recipe? Soak the beans overnight. Replace step 1 with: the night before cooking, sort the navy beans, removing broken beans, stones, or dirt clods. Rinse the beans and put them in a large container with the salt. Cover with 2 quarts water. Let the beans soak for at least 8 hours, or overnight. Drain and rinse the beans, then continue with step 2.
- Look for meaty ham hocks, if you can – the ones in the video I shot were from the end of the hock, and didn’t have much meat on them. Larger hocks are usually meatier, so if you have an option, get big hocks instead of small ones.
- Please, do not forget to season to taste at the end! Soup tastes bland and flat without added salt. Don’t worry if it seems like a lot of salt – you’re still adding a lot less salt than you’d get in canned beans.
