White Navy Bean Soup With Ham Hocks

Jason Sandeman's Note:

Ham hocks are available at your butcher. Okay, you might not have one. Do yourself a favor, and get to know one. If that means that you actually have to talk to the guy at the meat counter at the supermarket, so be it. Ask if you can get some hocks in. You would be surprised at the cost of the hocks. They are pure gold, and priced like dirt.

• Total Time: 10 hrs 10 mins
• Prep Time: 10 mins
• Cook Time: 10 hrs

Ingredients:

Serves: 8

Yield: 4.0 liters

• 2 small ham hocks (one could use a bone if you like, or just chopped ham.)
• 450 g white navy beans, washed and picked
• 2 liters water (This is to start, you will need more later.)
• 1 bay leaf
• 2 garlic cloves, minced
• 1 medium onion, diced
• 2 small russet potatoes
• 1 lemon, juice of
• to taste kosher salt
• to taste fresh ground pepper

Directions:

1. Pick through beans to make sure there are no stones. Nothing sucks like breaking your teeth on a stone when it should be a bean!
2. Place the beans in the crock pot; cover with water.
3. Set on high cooking and cook for an hour.
4. Now, some of you will argue that we should or should not season the beans because of the skins. Well, it is a moot point here as we are adding something salty to it anyway. Moving right along.
5. Ham hocks go inches If you cannot find ham hocks, don’t worry. The recipe will be fine. Just throw in a ham bone. No ham bone? You’re killing me here! You could just use a couple slices of ham.
6. Add your bay leaf to the crock pot. Don’t worry – it will float. No panic. Really!
7. Hack up the onion, a small dice is fine, toss it into te crock pot.
8. Mince the garlic, again – you guesed it – into the crockpot. Are you with me so far?.
9. Hack the potatoes into a medium dice, toss them into the crock pot. You will be needing them to give your soup some body – that stick-to-your-ribs quality. Besides, they are in season.
10. Set all of that onto 10 hour on low cooking.
11. Just before serving, remove the meat and bay leaf from the soup. Once the meat is cold enough to handle, shred it up!
12. Puree up half of the soup with a hand blender. Do it right in the crockpot! Why waste or clean another vessel. If you have dishwashers, then don’t worry about it. If you don’t – you get the idea.
13. Put the meat back into the soup.
14. Now is the time to adjust for seasoning. We start off with the lemon juice, then we adjust the salt and pepper in stages.
15. Taste a spoon full, think about the saltiness or the pepperiness. *I am sure that should be a word!*.
16. Once the soup is where you would like it to be, ladle it up and serve it with that local artisan bread.
17. Props to you! You just cooked something easy for Winter.

Reviews

[tinajoebob]

Loved the results of this recipe! The soup is very filling, and tasted awesome. I did not puree a portion of the soup at the end as suggested, and it was plenty thick. Don't let the metric measurements throw you off, it's easy to google the conversions (also, there's an app for that). My father-in-law is in his 70's, and he said it was like the soup he grew up on.