Southern White Bean Soup Recipe

Southern White Bean Soup Recipe Hi. I’m Betty. Welcome to Betty’s kitchen. Today we’re making Betty’s Southern Living White Bean Soup. And the reason I’m calling at Southern Living is that in the year 1990, I send in those recipe to the magazine Southern Living and it was published in a magazine, and it made into their yearbook. And here it is, white bean soup, and it continues all up to here and it has my name and the address Richmond Kentucky. They set me some meatloaf printed up cards of my endeavor and it appeared in the yearbook of 1990 Southern Living Annual Recipes, and it paid me a small amount of money. So, that was kind of neat thing to do and a lot of you are probably familiar with that process. So we’re going to make the white beans soup that went into the Southern Living Magazine. So, we start at this soup with white beans. And the first can here is a can of Navy Beans that’s a 16 ounce can, and the second here is a can here is a can of Great Northern Beans and this is 15 ounces. Now, think on the recipe card. It says, the 16 ounces for the first can and it has 15.8 ounces for the second can. I think, I’ve using lots of beans in most situations but that shows you how that has shown through all of years. It’s been a long time like 19 years since I sent that in. I have one cup of water so, I’m going to do is get a pot and put those three ingredients in it, and get it started on the back of the stove. Do not drain this, just go ahead and put your white beans in, then you have the Navy Beans and also the Great Northern Beans. Just as they concentrate from the can. Now, this lux brand will have little chunk of pork fat in them. If you would like to take that out, you can do that or you could wait for later, it’ll float up to the top. It does not really matter. It just that you choose that to have it in there, I want to warn you that it is in there. So now, the one cup water goes in with this and then we need to mash this a bit. And I do not forget I got my potato mashed out so I could find it here. I’ve got a bunch of beans and tinsels, I can hear this so I’m going to—kind of scrape this spoon off a bit and then just mash this. In order to have soup beans, you do not want that to have whole beans all the way through, in case your whole bean is fine. But I’m going to be mashing this up some more later. I’ll just tell you that, I’m just going to put it on the stove and get started heating here on the right burner. Just under low heat while I start this—the rest of it. What I have next and I don’t think this is necessary in order that is on my little recipe card but I know but it’s in here. This is a ½ stick of margarine or butter that’s one which I’m going to use but it’s melted already so it’s just on the sauce pan here. I’m going to be adding one quarter of a cup of onion, chopped onion. Here we go. And then—I’m just showing you, we used an onion, we used butter. We’ll use one carrot. Now, do not worry about how much it comes up to—it’s just an average sized carrot so, one chopped carrot. Now, these will go to the stove and be sautéed together. And I want to tell you my—put the final ingredient before I get those on the stove. We have some tender chunk ham. This is Hormel and in my recipe in the book, it says six ounce can, well that has shrunk over the years to a 5 ounce can. But it’s supposedly, according to my recipe, it says drained and flaked. I do not think I said that. I probably said flake but I would not drain away this juice so I’m still not going to do that. So, this will go in when we get everything that cooked out. So, we’re going to heat the bean mixture. We’re going to sauté this and then we’ll be putting those together and then the tender chunk ham will go in. So get me a minute to get this ready and then I’ll be back with you to finish up the soup. You can see how I have mashed these beans as I have cooked because I’d been right here tending to the vegetables that are sautéing over here. They are ready. You can see that the onion is clear, the carrot, it still has a little substance to it but you’re going to be cooking with soup for ten minutes. So that won’t get done, I’m going to turn that off and then over here, just mashed this as finely as you like. You can see the substance and the texture of it. If you like that, then go with that. You do not even have to mash it this much if you like more the whole bean in it or if you like it, just soup here then more mashing with potato mashed. I’m going to stop right there and you can see, it’s got a lot of pulp in there that is actually white bean. White bean meaning there are two kinds of beans, Navy Beans and Northern Beans, great Northern Beans. So now, let’s put our sautéed vegetables along with the butter that they were sautéed in. Let’s put that together with our beans that are mashed and heated and then that last ingredient that I told you about. Our tender chuck ham which I’ve taken in fork and kind of splitted the parts so I want all the—in the cubes but I can work with that after it gets into the pot also. So I’ll just put it in there, I’m just trying to chop it up a little bit as it goes. Then, I’m going to work on getting that incorporated a little bit. And let it cook for ten minutes, and then it will be a nice, lovely soup to serve up on a cold day and even though it’s April here in Kentucky, it is a cold day. We even have snow today, so this is going to be hardy dish for supper. My white bean soup was been cooking for ten minutes and it’s nice and thick and luscious. If you like it thinner than that, you can always add water. If you want to cook it longer or to need to for some reason, just let it stay on the stove longer. It does not hurt it. You just might need to pan it down a little bit. But this is what it’s going to look like after ten minutes. And if you just use the nice label and some kind of container or bowl, a mug, something like that, just dig in and get a nice bunch of that white bean soup. You’ll see that the chunks of ham are just gorgeous and this is a wonderful dish. So I provide the spoon for it. And then, what I like to serve it with are corn sticks and while I was cooking that, I start together some corn sticks just so I can put them on the plate to show you, let’s pop a couple of there out, they’re prepping hot. And I’ll use a half butter to go with them. So I just put a little butter on here. You can see how it’s going to drizzle down because it’s very hot. But you can eat that along with your taste of white bean soup. It’s just the gorgeous combination. It’s wonderful for winter day or even in summer. I like it. These are great. If you do not know how to make corn sticks, go to Betty’s Very Southern Corn Sticks or Corn Bread.