White Bean and Kale Soup with Pesto
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Last week I was visiting my friend Lauren in San Francisco (and her husband Jason and her baby Lua, hey fam) and she made me two delicious bean soups—one a lentil soup from Grist that I will be making soon, and this other white bean soup that she freestyled. I immediately came home and pretty much copied it—inspired a little bit by the topping from the lentil soup. What I strongly recommend is using Rancho Gordo beans or some other fancy/heirloom bean brand. Rancho Gordo has a bunch of different white beans that taste different and have different cooked texture, so you can choose a soft or more firm bean according to your preference. I made this soup for someone who is on an anti-inflammatory diet for health reasons and cannot have anything with spice or acid (though there is lemon and lemon is ok for them!). I don’t recommend cooking beans with much acid or salt at the beginning anyway, but if you wanted to add tomato paste or vinegar at the midpoint of the soup you could, and you could also season it with Aleppo pepper or Urfa chiles. This is a more stripped-down bean broth than I normally gravitate toward, and I recommend experimenting with simplifying your bean cooking!
I apologize in advance to my readers who want very exact measurements. This is a very flexible soup you make by feel—in ingredient amounts, in ingredients at all, in time.
Ingredients
1 pound of dried beans, rinsed and picked over for debris, soaked if you wish (I used Yellow Eye Bean)
garlic
fresh rosemary sprigs
olive oil
parmesan cheese (including rind)
2 bunches kale
tender herbs—basil, parsley, cilantro
pepitas
lemon
fish sauce
Cook the beans. Put the beans in a dutch oven covered in water. Usually recipes say “two inches” over the beans, but in my experience more than that is better. Add in garlic—I used a leftover half head, unpeeled— a few sprigs of rosemary, and enough oil to make a slick over the top of the water. Bring to a boil, then reduce to a simmer. Add salt (at least a full teaspoon!) and the rind of your parmesan and simmer until the beans are cooked but not falling apart. This time is very variable due to the age and type of bean, so just keep an eye on it.
Add the kale. While the beans are simmering, prep the kale by removing the leaves from the stems. Dice the stems and chiffonade the leaves. When the beans are cooked but firm, taste the beans and add more salt or water if needed. Then add the diced stems and a few minutes later the leaves. Cover and let simmer for until the kale is tender.
Make the pesto. In a food processor or blender, add a handful of pepitas, 1.5 bunches of roughly chopped herbs, the zest and juice of one lemon, salt, and one clove of garlic. Pulse to combine and stream in olive oil—a lot of olive oil! probably more than 1/2 cup!—until it looks like pesto. Taste and adjust.
Taste the soup. Add lemon juice, salt, or fish sauce to taste. If it doesn’t look liquid enough, add more water . Ladle soup into a bowl, top with grated parm, pesto, and more lemon or olive oil.