Salsiccia e Fagioli

Sausages and beans. My favorite food for our cold, humid winter. You know, when humidity is so much that it pentetrates your bones and it requires minutes near radiators before feeling better. That moment, the perfect night for sausages and beans.

I use clay pots for this meal, because it warms up the entire kitchen and spread its flavor all around the house.

 

Note: this procedure uses a clay pot. If you use a normal steel pot, prepare all the ingredients before warming the oil. Clay pots have a longer cooking time than normal pots and you might end burning your meal.

(1) Put the broth boiling aside, 2-3 spoons of extravirgin olive oil in the clay pot and let it warm (2). Meanwhile, cut finely the wite onion (i use a robot to cut it as finest as possible, it almost become a cream). Once the oil is warm enough, add the onion, the leaces of laurel, the juniper berries and the garlic (3).

Let the onion to cook, and prepare the sausages. Remove the peel from the two sausages (4-5), and prepare small meatballs (0.7-1 inch) with them (6). Remember to compact them enough with your hands to make them solid, or they’ll break during the cooking.

Leave them aside until the onion is cooked. It should gets golden without burning (7)

If you use a steel pot, this is the moment you have all your ingredients ready and you can start cooking the onion on the pot. Save the lauren and juniper for later when you’ll add the broth.

Place all the meatballs in the pot (8), and make them cook in the outside, stirring them gently. Both onion and meat should not burn because the fat in the sausage should melt and avoid burning. Eventually lower the heat a little while doing this. Once the meatballs are turned brown, higher the heat again and add the half glass of wine (9).

Once all the wine is evaporated, lower the heat. The broth should be boiling by now, add a ladle (if you use the steel pot, remember to put the laurel and junier) on the pot and the beans (10). Stir them gently with the meatballs and give them 2-3 minutes to release the eventual water they might still have inside (11).

Depending by the water they release, add another ladle of broth (13), then 3-4 ladles of tomato sauce (14). Stir gently again.

Your meal should look almost like the picture below now. Add the dried garlic if you haven’t used the fresh one earlier.

This is it! Let it cook at lower temperature until the end, stir from time to time, and add broth if it gets too dry one ladle at a time. In the last 10 minutes, adjust of salt, and higher the temperature to make most of the watery part to dry.

Cut some fresh bread (i hadn’t the bread, my fault), and serve salsiccie e fagioli by placing the clay pot directly to the table to keep it warm, and let your guest to serve themselves with a ladle!!