Fagioli cannellini
How to cook dried beans so they stay whole and creamy: a salted soak, a heavy pot, a short hard boil, then the gentlest shiver.
- Prep
- 15 min
- Cook
- 2 hr
- Total
- 2 hr 15 min
- Serves
- 6
Ingredients
- 400 g dried cannellini or borlotti beans, from this year's harvest
- 1 tbsp salt per litre of soaking water, plus a pinch for the pot
- 6–7 sage leaves
- 4–5 garlic cloves, unpeeled
- 3 tbsp olive oil, plus more to serve
- 1 pork rind, ham bone or smoked knuckle (optional, for body)
- Freshly ground black pepper
Method
- Tip the beans onto a tray and push them around, picking out stones, grit and shrivelled beans. Rinse well.
- Dissolve 1 tbsp salt per litre of cold water and soak the beans in plenty of it for 8 hours or overnight. Salt softens the skins so the beans cook evenly; it does not toughen them. Drain and rinse.
- Put the beans in your heaviest pot — cast iron or clay — with the sage, garlic, olive oil, pork rind and a pinch of salt. Add fresh cold water to cover by two fingers.
- Bring to a full rolling boil and hold it for 10 minutes. This destroys the toxin in raw beans (essential for red kidney beans). It is the only hard boil the beans will see.
- Cover and turn the heat right down to a barely shivering simmer, or move the pot to a 150 °C oven. Cook 1–3 hours depending on the bean, topping up with hot water if the beans surface. Overnight in a slow cooker on low works too.
- From the first hour, taste five beans from the top, middle and bottom of the pot. They are done only when all five are creamy right through, with no chalky centre.
- Turn off the heat, remove the sage, garlic and rind, and let the beans cool in their liquid. Do not drain them. Serve warm with plenty of broth, olive oil and pepper.
Everything here protects the thin skin. A hard boil tumbles the beans until they burst, which gives mush and cloudy broth. Keep acid — tomato, wine, vinegar — out of the pot until the beans are tender, then add it and simmer for another 20 minutes; early acid locks the skins firm for hours. Old, dull, cracked beans may never soften, so buy from a shop with fast turnover.
Do not drain the leftovers. In their broth they keep for days and become pasta e fagioli: warm a ladle of beans, crush a few, add short pasta and cook it right in the broth. They also go on garlic-rubbed toast, or beside a steak. Method after Aldo Bellini’s video “Never boil your beans again”.