Tour of Istria Day 3: Soup with Chickpeas and Pork (Minestra di Ceci)

Day three of our Tour of Istria featured another of Lidia Bastianich's recipes, this time a nice soup. Her recipe is made to serve twelve, and we reduced it quite a bit, but still ended up with way more food than we needed. We had more than enough for Herbie to have himself a little feast as well.

Herbie getting ready to chow down on some fall off the bone goodness

Like the Sugo di Pollo, the concept here was pretty simple, and it was fairly easy to prepare. It just takes a while to cook. What we especially liked about this was the minimal amount of chopping involved, as most was handled by a blender/food processor. This is why we like to make the Chimichurri sauce as well: let the blender do the work.

Root vegetables getting ready to be  blended in our "food processor." Cuisinart, if you're reading this, can you send us a real one? 

The basic concept of this dish is that some root vegetables are blended up, sautéed, mixed with crushed tomatoes, and added to a broth with chickpeas, potatoes and herbs. The soup is then simmered to cook some meat, allowing the soup to take on the flavor of the meat while making the meat quite tender and flavorful. Not that hard, just takes some time as the soup and meat must cook for about an hour, and the output is a nice, hearty, flavorful meal. 

Making the Dish

Our first step involved blending up the carrots, celery, and garlic, into this orange looking mash. Once that hits the saute pan, you get a nice fragrant aroma filling the whole house. At the same time, we had a pot of water (4 quarts worth) boiling with chick peas, some cut up russet potatoes, and a few herbs.

The base of our Istrian soup. 

Once the veggie mash had simmered for a few minutes and all the moisture had evaporated, we stirred in some crushed tomato. Originally, we had thought that the output of this soup would be a more white looking soup, thanks to the potatoes and chickpeas (no pictures for this recipe in Lidia's cookbook). Not so. This is in fact more of a tomato-potato soup.

Mixing the tomato with the root vegetable mash. 

After blending the tomato with the root vegetable, the mix is added to the pot with the chickpeas and potatoes, stirred up, and then brought to a boil, and then to a gentle bubble. Once you've got it to a gentle bubble, you can add in your meat. Lidia's receipe called for a smoke pork rib (meaning it was already cooked) that would be added about 30 minutes prior to finishing. Since we were working with uncooked country pork ribs, we added them in right away, and let them simmer in the soup for about an hour. Depending on how much liquid you have you can leave it halfway covered, or all the way uncovered, as you want it to reduce slightly while it cooks. 

Our country pork is getting nice and cozy with the chickpeas and potatoes. 

After the meat is cooked it can be removed from the soup and set out to eat. We then used a nifty immersion blender to blend the contents of the soup into a nice smooth puree. 

The pork is revealed from the depths of the soup. It was not easy to contain Herbie at this point. 

The soup was ladeled into bowls, topped with a drizzle of olive oil, grated cheese, and freshly ground pepper. 

The Result

Overall, this turned out to be a surprisingly delicious soup, and a surprisingly delicious piece of pork. While the soup has a strong tomato flavor, it is nicely balanced by the potato, chick pea, and other root vegetables. The addition of the grated cheese gives it a nice robust flavor. The meat is fall off the bone tender, just like the shredded chicken from the previous night, and having absorbed some of the flavor of the soup gives it a delicious after taste.

All in all, we'd recommend this if you've got some time on your hands or if you're looking to serve a huge number of people easily and deliciously.

Herbie would certainly agree:

Herbie got to eat a lot of nice, juicy pork, and now understands the term "food coma"