Salt-baking when you are not cooking the whole fish

and the rare and astonishingly delicious, fagioli zolfini

Yesterday some lovely friends came round for an (unaccustomedly) sober, mid-week supper.   To make up for the anticipated, tragic lack of wine,  I cooked some fagioli zolfini.  And then I forgot all about them, and they sat in a colander while we ate chickpeas instead. It’s like cooking a lobster, and then serving chicken nuggets. Well, not quite – the chickpeas had roast red peppers, chopped Amalfi lemon, red onion, and pomegranate seeds, so the suffering was not intense.  I also salt-baked a fillet of salmon (more of that later), and made roast aubergine with tomato salsa and avocado.

I also made  20-second mayo with the egg yolks that I didn’t need  for the salt crust. This was not quite its usual  success: I used some cheap vinegar, and wished I hadn’t; I then had to scrabble around  with my sober friends  to add herbs and a coffee spoon of chestnut honey to avert disaster.  Whether it was caused in the first place by a complete lack of white Burgundy,* or would have happened anyway, and was only rescued thanks to our  collective  sobriety, will never be known.

*I get a particularly good one from my childhood wine merchant, Tanners in Shrewsbury. It’s very good, but nowhere near the price of most of them.  I am now having an alarming debate with myself as to whether I should tell you exactly which one – or  the fact that they deliver everywhere for free. They are a small outfit and they might run out.

But back to the Zolfini beans.

It has taken me a long time to come to terms with the fact that some pulses are considerably more expensive than others, and that they are definitely worth it:  tiny beluga black,  Le Puy green, or castelluccio brown lentils   from Umbria are  a great improvement on the large brown or green ones, not least because they cook through without falling to pieces, so are perfect for salads.

But Zolfini beans are in a class of their own at nearly £30.00 a kilo.

Luckily, I bought a small bag of them twice without realising quite how expensive they were – in England, I flit between buying fruit and vegetables from East Street market and  Borough market; the one absurdly cheap, and the other, eye-wateringly expensive; and in Italy – where I bought them – I regularly get carried away, so I am used to the odd inexplicably high bill.  So by the time I did, I realised I couldn’t live without them.   

They are an endangered variety, grown only in the Pratomagno in Tuscany, and only a small part of it at that – along the Strada Setteponti. They are picked by hand and there are very few growers left.      

I find it hard to describe why they are so good because they just taste like beans – but the best beans you have ever tasted.  They are creamy; their skin is just thick enough to hold them together without being annoying when you eat them, and the flavour is just perfectly beany;   when I eat them, with nothing except the salt they were cooked in – perhaps a drizzle of olive oil, but they barely need even that – I wonder why I ever eat anything else. I’m eating some as I’m writing, but I still can’t come up with a better explanation than that.

Although the price is alarming,   the 350g (£10.00) bag would feed 4 and probably 6 people, which makes them really quite cheap compared to a lobster, and about on a par, per head, with chicken nuggets…

You can buy them from Seeds of Italy here.

Cooking Zolfini Beans:

They take quite a long time to cook:  2 – 3 hours, but they don’t need pre-soaking.

Boil them in a good-sized saucepan with plenty of water and at least a teaspoon of salt.  I also add peppercorns, cardamom seeds and coriander seeds as well.

Towards the end of cooking, they absorb a lot of water, so you may need to top up the water; quite possibly several times.

I am not going to give you a particular recipe for them because they are so delicious on their own, but  as they’ve been in my fridge this week, my breakfast salads are moving inexorably towards breakfast beans. I may get a Nobel for this one. The contribution to humanity is incalculable. Today’s involved  cherry tomatoes, red onion, chopped lemon, avocado, and pomegranate seeds and it was a very, very good start to the day.

Zolfini bean salad with poached eggs