The French Basque & Gascony · Soup
Garbure Béarnaise
- Intermediate
- 35 min
- roughly 3 of 4 for cost
Leads with warm spice humming through the middle, aromatics blooming from the first bite, lifted green at the very end.
Ingredients
- 1 ham hock of about 700 g, or a jambon de Bayonne bone
- 2 confit duck legs
- 250 g haricots tarbais, soaked overnight in cold water
- 800 g green cabbage, cored and cut in wide ribbons
- 500 g potatoes, in 1 cm slices
- 300 g carrots and 200 g turnips, in large pieces
- 1 leek, split and washed
- 1 onion studded with 2 cloves
- 4 garlic cloves
- 1 bouquet of thyme, bay and parsley stalks
- piment d'Espelette
- a glass of dry red wine, to finish at the table
The skills inside
ConfitSkimming: foam, fat and a clear brothSoaking dried goods back to life
The words inside
ConfitJambon de Bayonne & French Whole-Muscle HamsGreen Cabbage
Allergen screen
Found: alcohol
Screened for: gluten, dairy, egg, nuts, peanuts, fish, shellfish, molluscs, soy, sesame, celery, mustard, lupin, alcohol. Not screened: sulphites.
Screened by keyword from the ingredient list, not reviewed by a person; check every label for what the list cannot show.
Method
- Cover the hock and the drained beans with 3 litres of cold water, bring up slowly and skim the grey foam until the surface runs clear, then add the clove onion, garlic and bouquet and hold at a murmur for an hour.
- Add the carrots, turnips and leek and cook until a knife enters a turnip with just a little resistance left.
- Add the potatoes and cabbage and cook on until the cabbage is dark and silky rather than squeaky, about 25 minutes. 25 min
- Warm the confit legs, pull the meat into large shreds and stir them in for the last ten minutes so their fat glosses the broth.
- Crush some of the potato against the side of the pot until a spoon stood upright in the middle stays standing, then season with Espelette and taste for salt only now.
- Serve, and let each person pour red wine into the last inches of broth in the bowl.
How to tell it is going right
This dish has no standard of its own yet. It is judged on the techniques it exercises: checked at the pan, while there is still something to be done about it.
Soaking dried goods back to life 69 recipes
- Fully submerged with room to swell: the level is well above everything at the start and still above it at the end.
- Given the full time, and judged by what is in the bowl rather than by the hours on the clock.
- Tested at the CENTRE of the largest piece, cut or pressed. Anything with a hard dry core will still have one after cooking, because the outside softens first and stops the water getting further in.
- The soaking water was dealt with on purpose: kept because it holds flavour, or thrown away because it holds what should not be eaten, but never simply left undecided.
- Drained before it is used, so the dish does not silently gain all the water that came with it.
Where it goes wrong Too little water, or too little time. The pieces swell until they are packed tight against each other and the ones in the middle never fully take up water; they will not soften later in the dish either, so the finished plate has hard pieces scattered through it.
Skimming: foam, fat and a clear broth 73 recipes
- It is held below a rolling boil for the whole time. Agitation drives fat and fine protein into the liquid as an emulsion, and nothing skimmed afterwards will take them back out.
- The grey foam that rises in the first minutes is lifted off and discarded rather than stirred back in.
- Fat is taken from the surface where it gathers, the pot moved off the centre of the heat if that is what it takes to collect it in one place.
- The liquid is visibly clearer at the end than it was at the start: it is possible to see down into it.
- Nothing lifted off goes back in. What was skimmed is discarded, not tipped back once the ladle is full.
Where it goes wrong The pot was allowed to boil, usually while something else was being attended to. Fat and protein emulsify into the liquid under agitation and cannot be lifted off afterwards, so the finished broth stays cloudy and greasy however patiently it is skimmed from then on.
At the Table
- The Pour
- Pinot Noir (the classic)
- Also Right
- Cru Beaujolais (Morgon)
- From the Taps
- Belgian dubbel
- Zero-Proof
- Black cherry spritz
Acid and silk against duck fat: the oldest marriage in Burgundy, with Gamay as its cheerful younger witness.
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