Rebar: Modern Food Cookbook

This soup was easy to prepare, healthy, and tasty – all the properties I love to have in my food. If you do a few  things in advance, you can churn out a large amount of this soup pretty quickly and give yourself leftovers for weeks to come.

Like most of the recipes we’ll make, we substituted canned black beans for dried beans. Because the beans are so prominently featured in this recipe, I may use dried beans if I make it again, but the canned beans still produced a flavourful soup. To compensate for the pre-cooked beans, we cooked the soup base (garlic, onion, jalapeño, spices) a little less than specified, just until the onion had softened.

This recipe gets a lot of its flavour from the Rebarbeque sauce it uses. Rebar’s take on BBQ sauce takes under an hour to make, can be made in large batches, and stores up to 3 weeks in the refrigerator – a perfect recipe for summer. For the bottle of dark beer in the Rebarbeque sauce I used a porter that I helped make in my local beer brewing club. The BBQ sauce was dark, rich, and complex, and is definitely something I’ll make again – it was great on veggie burgers, chicken, and pork…pretty much anything. Those of you that are sensitive to spicy food should probably use half (or less) of the chipotle purée that’s called for.

This soup also gets a nice kick with the optional garnish of mango salsa, another Rebar recipe. We used a jalapeño instead of the serrano that’s called for, mostly because that’s what we’d picked up at the store, although the substitution would work well for anyone that can’t handle the heat of a serrano. As is true with most Rebar recipes, add the heat slowly and you’ll most likely find yourself stopping long before you reach the recommended amount.

A quick and easy soup is a great thing – all the satisfaction of digging into a hearty bowl of soup, but easy enough to prepare after coming home from work. Rebar’s Black Bean Soup is one such soup, and definitely one that I’ll have again.

Spring is here, which means it’s time to put away hearty winter soups and stews, but it would be a shame to do so before trying this delicious bean and kale soup. The soup is simple both in terms of ingredients (cannellini beans, tomato, kale, and spices) and preparation. Making the whole thing from scratch using dried beans takes about an hour, but you can shave about 20 minutes off of that if you use canned beans like we did.

Because this isn’t a complicated recipe, using high-quality, fresh ingredients will make even more of a difference than it usually does. The organic kale we used was especially tasty, as was the rosemary, but if we had made this a little later in the season we could have used some heirloom tomatoes instead of the called-for romas. We ended up cooking the canned beans a bit longer than called for, but this served to thicken the broth which would otherwise be a bit thin.

I was a bit concerned about the seasoning for this soup until the very last step, which involves adding some balsamic vinegar. This totally transforms the soup, and really gives it a unique character. Another nice touch is the suggestion of adding orzo, which helped make the soup a bit more hearty, although the recipe could have been a bit more explicit as to when to add it (~15 minutes before the end worked for us). We deviated from the recipe a bit in that we added some spinach that we had laying around, and we skipped adding the suggested drizzle of olive oil to the final prepared dish, but other than that this recipe was easy to follow and had no surprises.

Like most entries in the Rebar cookbook, this soup made far more than the suggested serving size (we got about 12 servings instead 8).  This may be the last hearty soup that we make until the cold weather comes again, but luckily there are plenty of leftovers so we’ll be able to enjoy a few more bowls of this delicious soup.