Published January 1, 2001.
For our best Tuscan white bean soup, we tossed out all those rules about how to prepare dried beans: We skipped the presoak and added salt. A cooking broth with onion, garlic, bay leaf, and pancetta gave the beans a welcome sweet and sour flavor. Infusing the broth off heat with rosemary perfumed it with an herbal fragrance.
If possible, use fresh dried beans in this soup. For a more authentic soup, place a small slice of lightly toasted Italian bread in the bottom of each bowl and ladle the soup over. To make this a vegetarian soup, omit the pancetta and add a 4-ounce piece of Parmesan rind to the pot along with the halved onion and unpeeled garlic in step 1.
Dear Friend,
These days, it’s pretty easy to get free recipes on the Internet. I’m sure a search for “roast chicken recipe” will turn up thousands and thousands. But, as with so much on the web, you should tread lightly if you don’t know the source.
In America’s Test Kitchen, our motto is, “Recipes that Work,” and our mission is to be your trusted source for recipes that work every time you use them. Our test cooks spend their days obsessively testing recipes until they offer consistently great results. As we like to say here, “We make the mistakes so you don’t have to.”
CooksIllustrated.com is the only place you can find not only 20 years' worth of our foolproof recipes, but also objective ratings of cookware, and blind taste tests for hundreds of everyday supermarket ingredients (hey, without the proper ingredients and equipment you can still run into problems — no matter how good the recipe).
Let me make a simple, no-nonsense offer. Try out our website FREE for a 14-Day, No-Hassle Trial Offer. I’m pretty confident that CooksIllustrated.com will quickly become an invaluable resource for everything from quick, weeknight suppers to huge, holiday feasts for family and friends.
Thanks for your consideration,
Christopher Kimball
Founder and Publisher
