blackbean soup w/ pork and chicken

Here is a blackbean soup recipe of my own creation. It's something to do with leftover pulled pork, and will change your religion, or give you some if you ain't got it. I believe you can't make soup in small lots, so . . .

Sort and soak two pounds of black beans for 12 hrs.

Bring to boil and simmer a few smoked ham hocks in a covered pot of chicken broth overnight, while the beans soak. In the morning, skim fat, separate meat from bones and from skin and gristle. Set meat aside (if your ham hocks have any) and return bones to broth for the duration. (Skin-on hocks have very little meat. Skinned forelegs usually have a lot. Both have good flavor.) For broth, either use two cans of Swanson chicken broth (large ones), or cook up three/four pkgs of chicken backs in sufficient water. Skim off chicken fat.

A quick word about water. Beans don?t get soft in hard well water. Buy soft water, both for soaking and meat boiling if you don't wanna use commercial chicken broth. Also, pour off soaking water and discard, and for nutritional reasons, don?t employ the fast-bean-cook method (of boil and set aside covered) because beans don?t sprout and make max. protein available thataway.

In a lge. saucepan with some olive oil, saute coarsely sliced carrots, celery and leeks (or sub white cooking onions cut into eighths), as much as you want. Have some chopped parsley set aside, too, but don't put it on until the very end. I use about three or four of each, and sometimes lay low on the celery in favor of leeks and carrots. Two really, really lge. leeks work well, but I don?t think you can overdo them.

Drain soaked and swollen beans and rinse several times. Pitch soak water and put beans in broth, enough to cover by three or more inches. Add more canned chicken broth if you need to. Bring to boil and reduce to desired strength, then simmer, covered, until beans just start to soften up--about 45 minutes before they?re done. At this juncture, add saut?ed stuff and as much pulled pork as you like (mmmmm, meat) and cook until everything textures out to your satisfaction. Season with understanding that hocks are already salty, and store-bought broth is full of sodium.

Stir up and while very hot ladle what you won?t soon eat into clean Mason jars. Tighten down new flat lids with rings. Just wash the jars out good first, or swirl them with a little bleach and rinse well. No need to really "can" this brew. Turn jars upside down on counter for five minutes. Then upright. They will seal as they cool. Don't touch lids until jars have cooled off. Domed lids will suck down and soup will keep refrigerated for several months, no problemo. Must be refrigerated, though.

Canned Swanson?s broth is superior to the other major brand (I fergit its name) if you buy ready-made. In either event, it?s hard to get good chicken stock with skimpy backbones from young fryers (most of the package rends into fat), and the commercial canned version isn?t better or worse. (Salted heavily, I believe, so you'll know you're tasting something.) When we're lucky, we're boiling one of our own stewing hens (which is where you get real chicken flavor?from old chickens) or the bones off several large roasters. I also keep back the bones from chickens from my smoker, too (not the WSM, the big upright Freezer-converted-to-smoker smoker), for the smoked chicken flavor, but then I make a different soup.

My favorite tableside additions are squeezed fresh lemon over the top (with a sprinkle of parsley) and hot sauce of choice. This is a robust, hearty soup, a killer served with crusty hot buttermilk cornbread. Serve it at the right season, in November, or in early Spring when the weather briefly turns back toward winter, and it will immunize you to hard times, make you dare them to come near. Really, it's damned good any season you are hungry.

It's cold here again. Got the wood stove burning and I'm headed to the basement freezer for some home-smoked hocks.

Dean,

Sounds like a great recipe, I'll be trying it soon enough even though we'll soon be in warm weather season here. I'd like to ask you a question not related to the soup, though.

You mentioned your converted freezer/smoker. I was wondering if you could describe your conversion and how you use the smoker. I just came into a "free" freezer which maybe not surprisingly doesn't freeze. Rather than pay to have it hauled away, I thought I'd try to make the proverbial silk purse out of a sow's ear and use it as a smoker. Any tips you can give would be greatly appreciated, please hurry as my wife would like me to do something with the piece of junk ASAP.

Thanks,

Rick

Glad to help, Rick. My freezer carcase became available when I drilled a hole through a refrigerant coil while installing a hasp to keep the door from springing open.

Basically, I gutted the thing. Took out all the shelves, everything inside that I could dismantle. Even cut out the molded plastic trays on the inside of the door because they encroached on the space inside the smoking chamber. I faced the exposed foam insulation on the door with aluminum flashing from the hdwe. store. Cut a hole in the top for a 6" vent and pop-riveted a stovepipe with a conical roof to the outside shell. Shielded the foam in the top with a piece of alum. flashing. Installed a cast iron damper inside the stove pipe. Cut out a square area in the door bottom and installed an adjustable louvered furnace floor vent cover, about 6" by 8". For best results, you need to control air as it comes in and as it goes out, sometimes rushing good volumes of air through, sometimes shutting off the supply almost completely.

Bolted some standards to the inside so I could hang hams and chickens from thick ash poles scavenged from a hoe handle factory nearby. Best thing I did was install a thermostat which I bought from Plaktronics in Texas. I plug my heat source to it (alternates between double-eye hot plate and a high wattage electric barbecue element resembling a charcoal starter that I bought cheaply for the task from a missionary thrift store), set the temp and only have to worry about the sawdust pan for smoke. In either event, you need to make a shield over it and the sawdust pan so fat does not drip down and catch fire. I fashioned one with some leftover alum. flashing.

Chris has here a marvelous website, comprehensive and organized well beyond my fantasy notions of the ordered life. If you click on "Posts: 48" at the bottom of this post, you'll reveal every embarrassing statement I ever made on this forum. It's all recorded. Go to posts 8 and 6 under the topic Jerky Shelves (#'s 18 & 19) and you will find links to digital photos of the outside of the smoker (the vent does not show up well), the jerky shelves that I cobbled for the task (they work great, and jerky smoked at 100 degrees is wonderful), and a view of four smoked chickens hanging off the ash poles (smoker can do 16, maybe more if I crowded them). I do hams and bacon, etc., but the chickens are the house specialty. Just got a hunnert day-old RockXCornish chicks last week, and they are busy now eating into their destiny.

I located an external smoke box that feeds sawdust automatically and blows smoke into the smoke chamber. Cheap. Off a commercial unit. It's in PA and I'll pick it up this July and get it installed. Honestly, I like smoking even better than barbecuing. You don't have to be very smart to get good results, because it all happens in very slow motion and temp ranges are not very critical. In contrast, took a brisket off several hours ago from the WSM. *&%%##!!! digital thermometers! I'm going back to old-fashioned dial types and a sprinkle of common sense.

If I've missed anything, obscured a simple task, or if you want dimensions for any of these parts, holler.

Ground 265 lbs of pork butts and feral hog a month or so ago, stuffed it in casings (6 different kinds of sausage) and added cure to 50 lbs for smoking. Wish now I'd done more with cure.

Smoker is very versatile. Cheap to build, too--larger and cheaper even than the ones that sell for 1300 dollars and sport only a 50 lb capactiy. Bargain even if you have to destroy your own freezer to make one. That's what I told my wife.
kielbasa

Thanks, Dean. The pictures were a big help, I was having some trouble visualizing what you were describing. Looks like I'll have a fun project to work on for a while. Now I'll bother you for something else. How do you do your bacon? I've had a special request from the wife to make some, so now I have my excuse to keep the eyesore of a freezer around.

Thanks again,

Rick

If you get into smoking meat, you should probably buy a copy of the Kutas book, "Great Sausage Recipes and Meat Curing". Look around. You can get an inexpensive copy. Even if you buy new, try Cabelas.com. There are other info books, too, and lots of online sources.

If you just want to get your feet wet at first, buy some Morton Sugar Cure Mix. Sugar Cure is specially formulated for bacon and ham. Just follow curing directions on bag. It's all there. You can use Tender Quick, too. You can also buy ready-mixed cure from butcher-packer.com. They have a maple syrup cure that is quite good. If you measure up your own ingredients, be wary of using dextrose where it's called for. I don't like the stuff. Substitute 70 % cane sugar of the amount called for.

Not really necessary on sides, but you should use a perforated needle to inject them with an amount of solution which is determined as a percentage of weight (usually around 6 %). You can buy such a needle from butcher-packer.com and a large syringe from any Farm Supply store (the one that sells with the needle costs too much). YOu will need one for hams.

Even mediocre smoke jobs on hams and bacon are far superior to anything from the grocery store. You have to get to specialty stores before you can come close.

Thanks again, Dean, I promise I won't ask too many more questions until I get the freezer built and try my hand at some bacon. A local restaurant supply has a video by Kutas, but I'm not sure about the book. I've been meaning to pick up one or the other, but now maybe I'll try to get both of them.

I'll let you know how the projects come out.

Rick

Questions are not a problem, Rick. It's the answers that I worry about.

According to a friend of mine who has seen the video, save your money.