Recipe 12: Tuscan Bean and Kale Soup (Samin Nosrat’s Salt Fat Acid Heat)
It’s so much more than just a big bowl of vegetables!
Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat by Samin Nosrat is a charmingly illustrated and wholly cheerful comprehensive guide to gaining confidence in the kitchen. This is less of a cookbook and more of a book about cooking. If you’re looking for a bunch of innovative new recipes, this might not be what you want in your cookbook library, but if you want a straightforward approach to why food tastes good and learn how to make (and modify) some real workhorse recipes, pick up a copy. Nosrat covers everything from how to properly soak and cook a basic pot of beans, to a perfect roast chicken, to making mayonnaise from scratch and she does so in a way that makes you feel as if she’s standing beside you in the kitchen providing constant encouragement. This book hasn’t drastically changed the way I cook so much as it reinforced my own confidence that this is how I cook to begin with . . . so I must be doing something right! I’ll admit, after my initial scan, this sat on my bookcase for over a year before I made anything from it, but I’m very glad to have started with her Tuscan Bean and Kale Soup.
The only real factor to consider in this case is time. You need to soak your beans and cook up a batch before putting together the soup. She does say that you can “feel free to use canned beans in a pinch” but I opted for the dried beans. There is a little bit of chopping and peeling involved, but for the most part it’s throwing vegetables into a pot and letting them simmer.
No real surprise here . . . sometimes simple recipes are the best. Like most soup and stew recipes, this gets better the next day when the flavors have some time to meld. I found this to be much more flavorful and filling than I would have thought by just looking at the recipe, and it’s very easy to adapt to your liking. I add some extra garlic and a good amount of red pepper flakes for extra heat and it’s been fun to experiment with different bean varieties. I’ve done the recipe with and without the option of chopped bacon and it was fantastic both ways. Whatever you do . . . serve it with some nice crusty bread since you’ll want to sop up every drop!
Read my “Cook With Me This Year” post for background on my little kitchen project.
