We can create excellent dishes, if we have quality beans
ingredients for 4 servings (cost about 4€ pp)
- salt
- 400 g small shrimps
- 200 g small white beans
- EV olive oil
- 1/2 small red pepper
- allioli sauce made with 2 garlic cloves, one egg yolk and 200 ml EV sunflower oil
- fresh thyme
- Paprika
I have already informed you about the famous Catalan Santa Pau beans but in every country there are excellent varieties of beans.
In Italy there are the borlotti di Saluggia and the canellini di Atina, in Greece the giants and elephants of Prespes and also the vanillas of Feneos, in France the Cocos and the black eyed beans and many many more.
Good quality beans, if well prepared can guide us to a great dish such as the one we are going to prepare today.
So, first of all we have to buy “fresh” beans, that means beans collected the same year. If organic, even better. Old beans are too hard and dry, and they can´t been cooked uniformly, as their old age and very dry situation creates ¨hard points¨.
The night before, we soak the beans in mineral or filtered water.
The next day we drain the beans, we put them in a big pot full of cold water and we bring to boil. After about 5 minutes we are going to see some foam on the surface of the water. With a slotted spoon we start removing the foam till the moment the beans stop producing any more. This foam is that provokes the known gastric problems.
We take the beans out of the “dirty” water and we wash them under running water. We put the beans in a kitchen net.
We fill a pot with cold filtered or mineral salted water and we put inside the net with the beans. We bring to heat and when the water starts boiling, we reduce the heat to low and we let the beans simmering till tender. We remove carefully the beans.
We put salted water in another pot and we boil the small shrimps for about 2 minutes.
We then prepare the allioli sauce. Do you remember how? We beat with the immersion blender two garlic cloves with a little bit of salt, an egg yolk and two tablespoonfuls water and then we start adding 200 ml of EV sunflower oil till creating an emulsion. That´s all!!!!!
When the allioli is ready we preheat a wok and we add just a little bit of olive oil. We add the minced pepper and after 2 minutes the shrimps and we sauté them for 1 more minute. We add the beans and we continue for 30 seconds more.
We put the beans and the small shrimps in plates, we add the allioli sauce, paprika and fresh thyme and we serve.
