I am uber busy this week. So much so that I have not had a chance to bake any bread or think of anything witty with which to amuse you. Busy though I may be, I got really hungry today what with the unpacking, mirror-hanging and the installation of my taxidermied fish. So I decided to make this busy-girl stew which entails not much more than chopping a carrot and boiling a few beans.
Have a look.
Busy-Girl Stew
Here's what you will need:
A cup each cranberry beans and farro. A heaping third cup of canned tomato, whole/chopped, whatever you have. You can even use a couple of tablespoons of tomato paste. You just need some sort of 'tomato product' (old restaurant slang). Grab a celery rib, a carrot, some herbs, I'm using marjoram and thyme. I also have two leaves of bay. Grab an onion, 3 fat cloves of garlic, and a bunch of red Russian kale.
Almost forgot. You will also need a leek.
First things first, soak your farro with one tablespoon of lemon juice. If you are using whole 'un-pearled' farro, soaking them countertop is fine. If you are using farro perlato, or semi-perlato, I like to soak them in the fridge and for no more than 8 hours. They don't have the outer bran layer that require serious soaking times, and you could end up with mushy grains if you soak them too long. Speaking of soaking, remember when we talked about digestibility of grains and beans a couple of posts ago? In case you've forgotten, overnight soaking dramatically reduces cooking times and helps the body to digest the sugars in grains and beans with ease. Adding an acid to grains helps to neutralize the grain's natural enzyme inhibitors which make it difficult for us to digest their sugars and access their nutrients. So, be sure to soak your farro and cranberry beans. But please don't add acid to your bean soaking water. It will toughen the skins.
Now, peel the carrot. Dice. Chop off the dark green part of the leek, peel off its outer layer, dice, rinse well. Dice the onion and celery. Slice your garlic.
Get it all into a pot and sweat it down. Yes. Add your bay, but not the rest of the herbs. I know I always tell you to salt each layer, but not here. Adding salt early on toughens the skins of the beans and hampers uniform cooking. Unpleasant.
Your veggies should be translucent and soft like this.
Add your tomato product.
Cook that tomato down till it caramelizes. You will know you've accomplished your goal when it starts to darken, smell sweet, and coat the bottom of the pot.
Great, now deglaze with a little water, scraping up the tomato film.
Add plenty of water to the pot, enough to cook the beans for however long they take. Of course, if your water gets low and the beans are not done cooking, you can always add more. But do try to keep the beans fully submerged, or they will not cook evenly.
When your beans are almost done....
Cook your farro, but first, lets talk about it. There are varying degrees of pearling with grains. Pearling means that some of the bran has been abraded from the grain, making for quicker cooking. Since I am using perlato, or "pearled", it will cook pretty quickly. You can also buy semi-perlato, but it will take longer to cook because it has only been partially "pearled". Because I soak my grains overnight, the cooking time the next day was 6 or 7 minutes, when normally it would take about 20. If you can find whole, un-pearled farro, please buy a pouch and experiment. It would be outstanding in this stew, but then it wouldn't be called 'busy-girl', instead it might be 'slow foods movement girl stew', because whole farro that has not been pearled will take close to an hour to cook, a little less if soaked overnight. One exception to lengthy cooking times and whole farro is if you use farro piccolo, which is whole farro but the grains are smaller and they take less time to cook.
So, drain your soaked farro, and rinse briefly in cold water. Bring to a boil 4 cups of salted water. Add your farro. Cook till tender. And as you now know, it will take more or less time dependent upon what type of farro you have used. Drain any excess water. Toss the farro in a teaspoon or so of olive oil and set aside.
So, drain your soaked farro, and rinse briefly in cold water. Bring to a boil 4 cups of salted water. Add your farro. Cook till tender. And as you now know, it will take more or less time dependent upon what type of farro you have used. Drain any excess water. Toss the farro in a teaspoon or so of olive oil and set aside.
Rough chop your herbs.
Remove the stems from your kale (mine were tough, and I am far too busy today to wrestle with them), and rough chop the leaves.
Add a little water to a skillet, just enough to wilt the greens.
Like this.
Your beans are tender, yeah? Good.
Pull out the bay leaves.
Add the herbs to the pot.
Plunge your submersible blender in there and give a few whirs. Don't go crazy, you want it to be chunky. I think I pulsed the blender about 6 or 7 times.
And now it's time to get back to work! My apartment is shaping up, no?
A lovely place to dine.
Busy Girl! I’m new to your blog and got here by googling farro. I was just checking my references for a re-write of la mia propria ricetta per Zuppa di Farro col Cavolo Nero al Gesturino! Let me compliment you on your recipe, its writing style and your gorgeous photos. I may even try it sometime although I love my own recipe so much that it would be very hard. I recently found Whole Farro and soaked it close to 8 hours and cooked it a good hour in my recipe and it was still a little chewier than I prefer, which approaches that of cooked, but slightly al dente pearled barley. Next day it was perfect, though. After years of making and enjoying Faith Willinger’s recipe for Grand Emmer and Bean Soup from Lucca, again googling farro I found an interesting zuppa online in the “About” site. It’s this recipe that I’ve adapted and my modifications get it closer in style to that of Angelo Pelligrini’s fantastic minestrone recipe, which I originally obtained from a wonderful article on him in the NYTs way back in the 1980’s. My recipe has cooked Fagioli Borlotti and pancetta and a lot of Cavolo Nero, or Tuscan kale, which I think is the tastiest kale around and consequently I grow a lot of in my garden out back. It gives this zuppa the sharp flavor-notes—in combination with some great La Quercia pancetta—that I simply find irresistible. I might add that the separately cooked borlotti beans are put through a food mill and they are the thickener for the soup (al Angelo) and the bean broth is then the soup’s liquid. The farro is cooked in the soup, again a different approach from yours. Of course I wouldn’t think of drinking anything other than a sangiovese-based vino with this soup, or any other with fagioli borlotti beans for that matter. [One other note you may enjoy: this summer I grew a lot of those incredibly tasty French heirloom tomatoes, Jaune Flammée, and using Marcella Hazan’s easy method of making a tomato purée I puréed and froze jars of this orangish-fleshed wonder of a pomodoro. It was this that I used in my Zuppa di Farro col Cavolo Nero al Gesturino! and next year I will make most of my tomato purée from this tomato. If you haven’t tried them, I recommend you do. They make a wonderful tomato sammich with tons of bitter greens and veganaise between slices of my pane di Terni, which I’m about ready to toss into the oven right now.] Finally, my compliments on your discussion of the many types of farro and their cooking requirements—it’s the best that I know of.
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