Hard Core Bean Soup Lovers, Part II. tponetom
PART II
Tpone’s Recipe for "BSPar Excellence."
INGREDIENTS:
1- 8# Smoked Picnic Ham. [[Preferred: "Cook’s" Butt Portion, but only when it is on sale. This week, at Fry’s [[Krogers) Shank Portion was $ .99 a pound and the Butt portion was $ 1.19. No contest. Get yourself a good Butt,,,Ham, that is. You have to understand that the price is extremely important to the ultimate euphoria you will experience in that first slurp of the finished product. If I had to pay 3 or 4 dollars a pound for a ham, I would probably choke on the BS
2 - pounds of Navy Beans
6 - Large carrots
6 - single stalks of celery
1 - a whisper of garlic powder
6 - medium onions
? - another whisper of garlic powder after sampling the brew,
— Other spices as per the proclivities of the individual making the soup.[[Remember, someone threw the ‘overalls’ in Mrs. Murphy Chowder! To each his own.
Er, umm, maybe another teensy weensy whisper of garlic? Or a few more onions?
In other words, except for the beans, there are other ingredients, like bacon bits, which are optional.
My goal is to make 6 quarts of BS.
The Magic is in the cooking!
Now you must pay strict attention to the following procedures: [[remember the Love, Soup, and Ladies analogy thingy)
Step 1. Go to a Super Market and select a 2 # bag of Navy Beans, in a CLEAR plastic bag. Check at least 10 different bags. You are looking for a bag that has the least number of dismissible beans. Those are broken beans, rotting beans and beans that do not look very healthy. [[You would not go looking for a new boy friend or girl friend who had a brown paper bag over their head now, would you?)
Step 2. Selective discrimination. After buying the bag of your choice, you take them to your kitchen and empty the bag on a couple of cookie sheets and begin separating the ‘good’ beans from the chaff. [[Like if you had selected 3 or 4 potential girl/boy friends, you had to eliminate the ‘not so good’ from the special one.)
Step 3. Soaking the beans before cooking them will give you two options. Either put them in a pot filled with water and let them stand overnight or you can heat the pot of beans/water to the boiling point and let them boil for two minutes and then let them stand in the hot pot for an hour.
The two methods work equally well. On the recent batch I just made, I used the second method because I forgot to soak them the night before. [[My wife, what’s her name, thinks I am absent-minded.) With either method I SAVE the SOAK water, to be added later to the ham broth
Step 4. Cooking the ham the day before: I have a 3 gallon, blue enameled pot and I install the ham and fill the pot with water to within 2 inches of the top. After reaching the boiling point, I let it cook for an hour and a half. I use an ice pick to test for tenderness. I stick it in the ham and if there is no resistance, I assume that big beautiful butt ham is ready by my standards. [[Draw you own conclusions.)
Step 5. I remove the ham from the pot. I place the pot with the broth on the kitchen floor and use a fan to cool it off before placing it in the refrigerator for overnight cooling. The next morning, the ham fat has congealed and I remove most of it, due to Peggy’s insistence. We are just the reverse of Jack Sprat and his Wife.
Step 6. After removing the ham from the pot I begin cutting it up, removing the rind and layers of fat in order to isolate the butt bone with its succulent marrow and use it when I cook the beans. The closer to the bone, the sweeter the broth.
Next: Part III - Step 7. The "Creme de la Creme." [[Working on it.)
