A Welsh take on an Italian classic bread soup
We had made a big batch of home-made sausages and I wanted to find new and interesting ways to liven up a humble sausage meal. This is when I came across a recipe called Pancotto Pugliese. The main ingredients were pork sausages, potato, cannellini beans, spring greens, sprouting broccoli and rustic sturdy white bread such as a sourdough.
Intrigued by the name I wanted to find out more. I discovered that Pancotto was a traditional Italian frugal soup made from stale bread cooked in a broth or water. There are many regional variations. In Puglia the basics are potato, tomato, courgettes (aka zucchini) and turnip greens and of course stale bread.
So what did I have in my store cupboard? Obviously the sausages and definitely stale wholemeal sourdough bread from my sourdough experiment. I also had half a savoy cabbage and watercress in the hydro garden. But I had no cannellini beans. I did have some podded Czar runner beans though.
Runner beans are a familiar sight in summer vegetable gardens and allotments across the UK. It’s a climbing bean that tolerates cooler weather. The Czar is a native variety that can be eaten fresh in the pod or left to develop large white beans that can be dried and used like a butter bean. Last summer when I harvested the last of the crop, the green pods were tough and fibrous so I podded the large white beans and put them in the freezer. So now I had my beans for the soup.
Building Blocks for Pancotto Galles or Cawl Bara
Roughly chopped potato skin on
Pork Sausage
Garlic
Chicken Stock
Strips of shredded cabbage or any young green leafy vegetables
Canellini beans / butter beans or broad beans
Stale sourdough bread torn into large chunks
Chili flakes
White wine
Watercress tossed in the soup to serve
We ate this on a cold dry February night with some of the stale sourdough toasted and buttered.
I must admit this might become one of my go to recipes, it totally revitalised a brick like bread into something totally useable.
hydro2plate 