Image courtesy of Luca Santini.
With its inexpensive, comforting ingredients—think dried beans and a slice of bacon—pasta e fagioli is often regarded as a peasant dish among Italians, but that’s exactly why Luca Santini loves it. When he reflects on his childhood in Rome, the photographer affectionately recalls his mother rolling out handmade egg-pasta while preparing the soup for his family. “It is precisely thanks to food,” Santini tells Family Style of the affection his mother passed down: a love language that he is reminded of when he pulls out the recipe himself.
Ingredients
For the soup
- 4 ⅔ cups of fresh or dried cranberry beans, already soaked
- ⅞ cup of celery, carrots, and onions
- A spoonful of tomato paste
- Extra virgin olive oil
- Salt
- Pepper
- 1 bay leaf
- 1 sprig of rosemary
- 1 clove of garlic
- 1 thick slice of bacon
For the pasta
- 2 eggs
- ¾ cup of flour
- ⅔ cup of re-milled semolina flour (semola rimacinata)
Instructions
- Drain and rinse the beans well (soak for about 8 hours or overnight prior to this if you use the dry ones).
- In a saucepan, brown a mixture of celery, carrots, and onions by adding a tablespoon of tomato paste and a bay leaf with three tablespoons of oil.
- Add the beans and a pinch of coarse salt and cover with one and a half liters of water. After it starts to boil, let it cook for at least 30 minutes. In the meantime, prepare the fresh pasta.
- Pour the two types of flour into a bowl, add eggs, and start kneading by hand, so as to mix the ingredients and obtain a uniform dough. Form a ball, and let it rest in the refrigerator wrapped in cling film for 30 to 60 minutes.
- In the meantime, the beans should now be cooked. Take half of them and blend them in an immersion blender to create a thick cream. Add the cream to the part of the beans left in the pot and mix, so as to obtain a soft consistency.
- Once the dough has rested in the refrigerator, transfer it to a work surface and roll it out with a rolling pin, creating a rectangle one millimeter thick.
- Using a serrated pastry wheel, cut out squares about three cm per side and dip them for three to four minutes over a high flame in the pot of beans, so that they cook.
- Finally, brown a mixture of lard, rosemary, and half a clove of garlic, until the lard has melted.
- Add the mixture to the pot of beans with the heat off and mix well. Serve your pasta e fagioli immediately, garnishing with a few sprigs of rosemary and a sprinkling of pepper.
