Cooking Under Pressure

After paella I would say that fabada, or bean stew, is the second most famous Spanish dish. It originated in the Asturias region in northwest Spain between Galicia to the west and Cantabria to the east. The dish has now migrated to every other area of the country. It is a fairly simple meal to prepare if you have all of the essential ingredients. I was planning on making cassoulet but changed my mind after I came across a recipe for fabada in a gastronomic guide to Asturias. I just needed to make a special trip to the butcher to fill in the ingredients I didn’t have in my kitchen.

I remember first coming upon fabada by accident on my second trip to Spain when I was traveling by car through the Pyrenees. We had been driving all morning and we found an old inn off to the side of the road. It was one of those places that don’t have a menu, instead you just order whatever they have prepared that day. On that day they had fabada and my memory of Spanish cuisine has been favorable ever since.

I have always loved beans and any dish using beans. I had a professor in college who was from Spain and he swore that he lived on nothing but rice and beans when he was a student. I was extremely poor when I was a student so I followed his lead. I added the other poor-man’s ingredient, potatoes, to my humble diet. Rice, beans, and potatoes are still the staples of my diet.

Fabada Asturiana

Ingredients:

White beans

Chicken stock

Morcilla sausage (blood sausage made with rice)

Chorizo

Ham

Think bacon slices

Onion

Garlic

Bay leaf

Saffron

My trick with cooking dried, white beans is to soak them overnight, change the water, and then bring them to a boil for two minutes. Take off the heat and let soak for one hour. Most recipes call for either an overnight soak or the quick boil but white beans and black beans need both, in my expert opinion. Drain and rinse and then they are ready to be cooked. I sautéed a little of the bacon in the pot before I added the beans and the chicken stock. I also added a little garlic, onion, and the bay leaf.

I cooked the chorizo, onion and garlic, bacon, and morcilla separately and in the order written because of their different cooking times. I reserved a bit of the chicken stock and added this to the cooked meat and then added the saffron. I mixed the cooked meat with the nearly completely cooked beans and added the diced ham.

I have recently been initiated into the use of a pressure cooker. I slightly over-cooked my beans because of the drastically reduced cooking time when using a pressure cooker. I have noticed that pressure cookers are used by most Spanish families, probably because they are so stingy with energy usage. Beans that normally take over an hour to cook are ready in twenty-five minutes or so.

My fabada turned out rather well in spite of the beans being slightly over-done. The only thing you need to accompany this dish is good bread and olives, of course.

I was anxious to use the pressure cooker again so I used some potatoes and other vegetables and made a potato soup. I cooked the potatoes first in the pressure cooker with stock while I sautéed onions, zucchini, red pepper, and garlic in olive oil. When the potatoes were finished I added the sautéed vegetables to the pot. Because pressure cooking heat whatever is in the pot past the boiling point up to 280° the heat from the potatoes further cooked the vegetables and this helped cool the potatoes. I liquefied the soup a little but left chucks of the vegetables. I want to try a meat dish in the pressure cooker so I went out and bought a big chicken. I don’t know what I am going to do but I’ll figure something out.