Italian “Baked” Beans

Fagioli in pentola

This quick version of baked beans is done with canned beans cooked on top of the stove. My additions of sage and balsamic vinegar give it a slightly Italian twist, but keep the classic savory/sweet flavors we all love in baked beans. You can easily double this for a larger summer picnic gathering.

Yield

Serves 4 to 6

Ingredients

3 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil 1 medium onion, finely chopped 2 ounces diced prosciutto cotto 10 fresh sage leaves 3 tablespoons tomato paste 2 cans cannellini beans, rinsed and drained 2 tablespoons balsamic vinegar 2 tablespoons honey Kosher salt Peperoncino

Recipe

Heat the oil in a large saucepan over medium. Add the onion and cook until wilted, about 5 minutes. Add the prosciutto cotto and sage leaves and cook until sizzling, about 1 minute. Make a space in the center of the pan for the tomato paste. Stir and toast the tomato paste in that spot for a minute, then add the beans. Stir to coat the beans in the tomato paste. Add 2 cups water, the vinegar, and honey. Season with 1 teaspoon salt and a pinch of peperoncino. Simmer over medium heat until the sauce has thickened and coats the beans, about 15 minutes. Serve hot.

EAT DIFFERENT:

Flavor Booster

When we have beautiful ingredients to cook with, we owe it to them to bring out as much of their flavor as possible. It might be a period of marinating them or combining them with certain other complementary ingredients or even a special cooking technique. Here are a few that I have come to rely on.

The first technique is combining cooked and raw vegetables in a salad (insalata cotta e cruda). Roasting or grilling onions, potatoes or peppers, for example, rounds out and sweetens their flavor and creates a beautiful blend of textures with raw, more crisp vegetables like tomatoes. I enjoyed these salads while visiting the markets and friends’ homes in Palermo, Sicily, and they inspired me to get into the raw/cooked-salad habit when I came home.

Marinating vegetables in a sweet-sour scapece of winevinegar, sugar, olive oil, garlic, salt, and peperoncino is another tried-and-true flavor enhancer. With scapece, you typically marinate after frying the vegetables, but in the case of zucchini, which are so tender when sliced thin, I sometimes marinate before serving them raw. Scapece is an ancient method of preserving foods, and now simply helps brighten your ingredients. If you make the Neapolitan zucchini recipe that follows, you’ll taste that brightness yourself.

Weighting down meats like chicken or quail when they are being cooked helps to crisp the skin more quickly and evenly while keeping the meat itself extra juicy and flavorful. I split chicken breasts (or legs or thighs), flatten them and place them skin-side down in a cast-iron skillet and weight them with a foil-wrapped brick while cooking. You need something very heavy, and while a brick is ideal (as cooks throughout Italy have done for centuries), you can use a second cast-iron pan as an alternative. At our family’s restaurants, bricked chicken is one of our guests’ favorite dishes; it may become one of yours as well.