Guest Post: Sausage & Bean Soup

 by George Groot

George is a member of our Facebook Group and has written for us before. 

This recipe is a staple from my childhood. I generally make this soup for my family on Sunday afternoons, as it’s quick to put together and makes a filling meal. It also makes a pretty decent “refrigerator magnet” for any other leftover proteins you may have; just chop them up and add to the soup (although I’ve never tried leftover fish, the beef, pork, and chicken have all been successes).

Ingredients

• One 14 oz or larger smoked sausage (Kielbasa works fine)
• One can stewed tomatoes
• One can each: pinto beans, black beans, kidney beans, great northern beans, black-eyed peas (technically a bean, despite the name), and whatever else you have on hand
• One quart of savory fluid (stock, broth, etc)
• Seasonings (to taste)

Directions

1. Slice up the sausage into bite-size rounds and add to pot. 
2. Dump stewed tomatoes into pot.
3. Rinse the beans before putting into the pot. This will remove a large amount of the specific carbohydrate that ferments in your gut to give you gas.
4. Cover the bean/sausage/tomato mix with the savory fluid, and heat until it boils.

The notes are after the recipe, because we have manners

This recipe is much like “The Pirate Code” in that it’s “more like guidelines, really.”

My wife and I have made this recipe with beans we pressure canned ourselves. Even with Aldi generic canned beans coming in at under a dollar per can, it’s hard to beat the economy of canning your own legumes. 

What do you do if you can’t get sausage? This is where tinned meats, or pressure canned meats, come into play. The majority of the flavor from the sausage is a “smoky” note, but that’s not important from a nutrition standpoint. You can add back in a lot of “umami” flavor with soy sauce (which is shelf stable almost indefinitely) or even pressure can sausage ahead of time. 

If you keep Kosher or Halal, then obviously your meat options are more limited, but tinned chicken seems to work fine. If you are vegetarian, then there are all sorts of shelf stable “textured vegetable protein” soy options to mix in. 

The best part about this recipe is that it is cheap, quick, and filling, but whether or not it ends up “delicious” really depends on how you season it. I like a few slices of hot pepper (or a few dabs of pepper sauce) to liven it up, along with a few bay leaves, basil, and black pepper for more depth. Sometimes I’ll use “Italian stewed tomatoes” with the basil and oregano already mixed in. One time I used miso soup as the savory liquid, and it worked well enough that my younger son asked for that variation specifically.

There is one trick I’ve learned for rinsing the beans, and that is to use a cheap set of kitchen strainers. I bought mine from Ikea, but any set will do. If you don’t want to waste the water rinsing beans, just dump the contents of each can into the pot; your gut flora will eventually adapt to the non-digestible carbohydrates and the flatulence will diminish quite a bit. 

So if you are ever in a survival situation where water is at a premium you can, as Benjamin Franklin once opined, “Fart proudly.”