Spain - Fabada Asturiana

Preparation: 15 mins

With toddler: 30 mins

Cook time: 5 hours

Serves: 4 hungry adults

Olivier's: ★★★★

According to my search, there seems to be at least 34 Spanish stews to choose from, and they mostly seem to be variations of delicious pork products, seafood, and beans.  

I ended up going with Fabada Asturiana, mostly because I was in the mood for chorizo. After looking at several recipes, I ended up basing my recipe on this one.  

I didn't, however, have a giant cast iron pot; nor was I able to get hold of dried beans from my local online supermarket (I have a two-month old and a toddler and no time to go to the good shop); and I wasn't sure what cured pork belly was, except that maybe Nigel meant something like speck? Hard to say. I used speck anyway.  

Here is my adaption, with a slow-cooker, tinned butter beans, speck, and a bored toddler.

Ingredients:

2 x 425g tins of butter beans, drained

400g speck

1 large onion peeled and cut in quarters

1 full head - yes, an entire thing- of garlic, peeled

1 tbsp smoked paprika

a pinch of saffron

10 cups of water (down from the 12 cups across most of the recipes, since the beans were tinned and I was slow-cooking)

2 chorizo sausages

1 black pudding - a replacement for morcilla

Method: 

1. Set slow cooker to high

2.  Add water, onion, beans, garlic, paprika, saffron and speck. 

Toddler tip: Mine had great fun launching the garlic cloves from her place on the bench into the slow-cooker.

3. Leave for 3 hours

4. Add the chorizo and black pudding

5. Leave for another 90 minutes

6. Take out the meat and the beans (a colander was handy here) and set aside. Move the liquid to a pan and boil it down to make it more concentrated.  Ours was quite reduced in the end, but very, very flavoursome.

7. While the liquid is reducing, cut the meat into bite-sized pieces.

8. Add the meat and beans back into the reduced liquid and serve.  We ate ours with rice.

Notes:

It looked pretty good,and tasted delicious.  I'd probably put more beans in next time, and not being a fan of it, I'd give the black pudding a miss and add more speck or chorizo.  Other recipes suggest a ham-hock, which may work too. Another recipe suggested a bay leaf, which I didn't use, but there was already so much flavour that I don't think it needed it.  The other recipes also say to take the onion and garlic out at some point, but, I had no time for that and it didn't make it terrible or anything.