My sister’s bean soup recipe, it’s the greatest bean soup ever!
Ingredients:
1 to 1½ cups great northern beans
1 to 2 carrots, cleaned, peeled
½ of one jumbo onion, or one regular size onion
1 to 2 stalks of celery
1 T. of chicken (or vegetable base)
Pepper (to taste)
Garlic or garlic powder (to taste)
1 small can of tomato sauce
Extra-virgin (preferably Greek) olive oil
Salt (to taste)
Soak the beans all day, or overnight the night before
(reduces the gassiness effect!)
After they’ve soaked a good long time, bring the beans and water they’ve
been soaking in to a boil. While you are waiting for it to boil, you
can throw the carrots, celery and onion a food processor with a little
water to chop them up finely.
After you’ve brought the beans to a nice rolling boil, remove from heat
and rinse.
Then add about twice as much water as there are beans into a pressure
cooker, and add the finely chopped celery, carrots and onions (if
there’s about 2 inches of beans, you need about 4 inches of water!).
If you don’t have enough liquid in a pressure cooker, it will burn!
Plenty of liquid is also safer, especially with beans that have hulls!
Add the chicken base (boullion), pepper and garlic (to taste).
Close the pressure cooker and put steamer thing in place and set heat
to high. Once you hear the steamer thing making it’s music, turn the
heat down to medium-high to medium. Like having plenty of water,
reducing the heat is very important especially with recipes that
contain legumes (beans with hulls). On electric stoves, if you have
numbers, 7 is a good number. Cook on medium to medium high for about
20 minutes. After 20 minutes, remove from heat and remove the steamer
thing so the steam can release slowly and safely. Once the steam stops
shooting out the steam valve it should be safe to remove the lid.
For nice thick soup, remove a ladle or 2 of soup and put in the food
processor for a few seconds and put this new mushy mixture back with
the rest of the soup for a thicker soup. The final ingredients can
now be added, one can of tomato sauce, and olive oil (to taste) and
salt (to taste). Remember there’s already salt in the chicken base
and canned tomato sauce. For the oil, I think my sister probably puts
somewhere between ¼ to ½ cup of olive oil. Stir and serve!
(some people like to add a little vinegar as well)