Beans with Sausage or Pastirma

Name: Beans with Sausage or Pastirma: Turkish-Style Recipe
Prep time: 1 h
Cook time: 1 h
Total time: 2 h
Cuisine: European
Ingredients: White beans 1 cup (170 g); Water for soaking and cooking the beans; Smoked sausage, pastirma or smoked meat 200 g; Olive oil 3 tbsp; Garlic 1 clove (optional); Onion 2; Tomato 1-2; Tomato paste 1-2 tbsp (17–33 g); Salt, black pepper, hot red pepper, cumin to taste; Parsley optional

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2 hours

Eastern national cuisines are getting more and more popular. Most likely, this is due to the growing tourist flow to those parts.

The popular Turkish resorts beckon and warm, as an acquaintance of mine put it, who prefers to spend his vacation in Antalya enjoying the masterpieces of Turkish cuisine, Turkish drinks and the Mediterranean Sea.

The best-known hits of Turkish cuisine are, of course, the sweets: Turkish delight, baklava, halva and all kinds of pastries. Then there are the meat dishes that have firmly entered our menu: shish kebab, kofte, borek. Add to that all sorts of soups, ayran and, of course, doner kebab.

Few people know that Turkey is the birthplace of an overseas caviar, the eggplant one. Eggplant, or patlican as they say in Turkey, is the favorite vegetable of Turkish cuisine. And one of the most popular meat products is pastirma. This is the general name of a widely known dish of cured beef tenderloin. The tenderloin is salted, kept under a press, rolled in a mixture of spices (garlic, pepper, fenugreek), and then dried for a long time, hanging.

You can make a sausage version of bean soup without potatoes, using pork belly instead of them.

Beans are very popular in Turkey, and other legumes too; lentils are a constant ingredient in ezogelin soup, and dishes made from grains are popular in general. Bean dishes with meat can be found on the menu of any establishment, whatever its class. Stewed beans with tomato are a real signature dish of many places. Beans with sausage, even pork sausage, or with pastirma (Pastirmali kuru fasulye) or simply with any smoked meat is a tasty and easy dish that can be made with almost any meat.

More with sausage

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Homemade Grilled Pork Sausages

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Potato Sausage with Cracklings in Natural Casing

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Braised Cabbage with Sausages

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Homemade Chicken Sausage

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Ingredients

2 servings

White beans 1 cup (170 g)
Water for soaking and cooking the beans
Smoked sausage, pastirma or smoked meat 200 g
Olive oil 3 tbsp
Garlic 1 clove (optional)
Onion 2
Tomato 1-2
Tomato paste 1-2 tbsp (17–33 g)
Salt, black pepper, hot red pepper, cumin to taste
Parsley optional

Step-by-step recipe

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Beans

Cooking dried beans is not an easy task. If the beans are not soaked in water for a long time before cooking, you can boil them forever and end up with bean mush. By the way, the store sells canned beans that are fully ready to eat, and with them you don’t need to soak or boil anything. You can give them a try.
Sort the beans, removing any damaged by bugs.
Cover the beans with cold water and put them in the refrigerator overnight. It is best to soak the beans for the whole night and cook them in the morning.
In the morning, cover the beans with plenty of water and cook at a very gentle simmer until done, usually about 1 hour, until the beans are soft but not yet falling apart.
It is even better not to cover the pot, so you can control the boil, which must never be vigorous or bubbling hard. The top layer of beans can start to fall apart into mush while the inner layer is still raw, since the skin of the bean bursts easily, and you end up with mush.
Pour the liquid the beans were cooked in into a separate bowl and set it aside for now. You will need this broth for stewing.
Drain the cooked beans in a colander to let the water run off. Transfer to a bowl and cover with a cloth so they dry out less.

Sausage with onion

In a deep frying pan or saute pan, heat the olive oil until it gives off its characteristic aroma.
If you like, fry a crushed garlic clove in the hot olive oil, then discard the garlic. This trick is often used, for example, in Italian cooking.
Peel the onion and cut it into thin strips, as for the bean and onion recipe.
Put the sliced onion into the hot oil and fry over medium heat until golden, 5-7 minutes.
Cut the sausage or meat into cubes.
If it is smoked sausage, it can be pork or made of mixed meat, but be sure to remove the casing. If you chose pastirma, it is better to slice it thin, in slices or even strips. Smoked meat should be freed of any bones and skin, if there is any. By the way, we once made beans with sausage using balyk sausage, which is not ground meat but fairly large pieces of balyk, and it turned out excellent.
Add the sliced sausage or meat to the fried onion. Fry over medium heat for about 10 minutes, stirring constantly.
Add salt and pepper. Add ground hot pepper to taste; try to keep the beans with sausage only barely spicy. I recommend adding ground cumin on the tip of a knife.

Stewing and serving

Scald the tomato with boiling water and peel it, cut it and remove the seeds.
Cut the tomato into wedges and add to the meat. Turn the heat down to the minimum and stew the meat with the onion and tomato under the lid for 5 minutes.
Add the cooked beans and the tomato paste.
Add about 100 ml of the bean broth left after cooking the beans. Stew the beans with sausage and tomato under the lid over low heat for another 10 minutes.
If you like, sprinkle with finely chopped parsley.
Put the beans with sausage on plates and serve with fresh bread.