**The Art of Making Delicious Pasta Fagioli**

When it comes to cooking pasta fagioli, many people may think that simply throwing pasta and beans into a pot with some liquid is enough. However, this couldn't be further from the truth. To make a truly delicious pasta fagioli, one must pay attention to the details and take the time to create a rich and flavorful broth.

To start, one needs to begin by preparing the soup. This involves setting up the pot with the lid slightly askew, allowing the liquid to simmer at a low temperature. If the liquid reduces, the beans are exposed to the air, which can cause them to dry out and become crunchy. To avoid this, one should top off the liquid with water as needed. The key is to keep the beans submerged at all times, ensuring that they stay moist and flavorful.

Next, one must wait for the soup to cook for a couple of hours, allowing the flavors to meld together. This is also an excellent opportunity to check on the seasoning and adjust as needed. If you're ready for dinner, it's time to move on to cooking the pasta. Now, some may ask why not simply add the pasta directly to the pot with the soup. However, this would result in a soup that absorbs all of its liquid, leaving the noodles dry and starchy.

Cooking the pasta separately is essential to achieving the perfect consistency. A small amount of starch from the pasta can be beneficial, but if too much is added, it can make the soup thick and unappetizing. The pasta should be cooked until it's al dente, then added to the pot with the simmering soup.

One should also consider using a variety of ingredients to add depth and complexity to the dish. A ham hock or parmesan rind can be used to add flavor to the broth, while small pieces of meat can be shredded and added to the pot. The bone from the ham hock can be removed once it's been used to its fullest potential.

As you prepare your pasta fagioli, don't forget to have fun with it! Adding a sprinkle of red pepper flake or a pinch of salt can elevate the dish and make it truly special. And of course, no meal is complete without a drizzle of olive oil, which can add a richness and complexity to the soup.

For Carol's recipe for pasta fagioli from The Test Kitchen, the author has opted to use D daleney pasta, which comes in small shapes such as shells or elbows. This type of pasta will hold its own against the flavors of the broth, rather than absorbing too much liquid and becoming mushy. And don't forget to check on the bay leaf – if it's still in the pot after cooking, it may be time to remove it.

Finally, no meal is complete without a delicious dessert to round out the experience. For this writer, the perfect pick for a Bailey would be a small piece of something decadent and indulgent, perhaps even something as simple as skipping the shower altogether – a luxury reserved for those who are truly deserving of a treat.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enoh no you did Selenia oh no you did Aaliyah need okay that's the time all right today I'm making one of my all-time favorite dishes it combines two of my all-time favorite things which is pasta and beans and this is one of the dishes that my mom made so recently I was digging around in this old book bougie alley on pasta which is not where the recipe for this pasta fagioli comes from except I was flipping through it and I found inside handwritten notes that I took when I was in college and I was this was from a phone call home to my mom saying how do you make pasta fagioli so this is that recipe which is her recipe which is now your recipe there are three most important things that go into the soup are your sofrito which is the vegetable foundation for the soup which in this case is carrot and leek and garlic and it's not just the ingredients but the way that you get your sofrito to the right end point that's important and then the other elements are the cooking the beans cooking the pasta and bringing it all together so I'm going to start with you always start with your sofrito and different cultures have different things that they put in their sofrito generally always have a carrot an onion or a leek in this case it's a leek and always garlic and another thing that I like to do is I just blitz all of these vegetables the only thing that I'll do separately is just drop the garlic in and get that started a lot of people when they talk to me about making soup complain that their soup is bland and they can't figure out how to get more flavor into it and I really do think that the key to a super flavorful soup super flavorful soup is starting with the sofrito and really cooking it for a long time so it's not like a quick saute of vegetables that you would do for a stir-fry or if you were doing fried rice or something like that so I'm just gonna blitz these more so they're finely chopped more surface area they kind of dissolve so I don't want this to go all the way to where puree because then it would be too wet and it'll burn and it won't have any integrity left so this is just really finely chopped vegetables and this looks like an enormous amount and that's kind of the point it's gonna cook down so much its voluminous on purpose okay yeah if you don't like carrots who doesn't like carrot people don't like celery I think everyone no one really has a problem with carrots I think that's a made-up thing so that was a third of a cup of extra-virgin olive oil really this doesn't have to be super hot I don't want it to get a ton of color at the beginning so I'm adding all of the veg at once and I'm gonna season this right off the bat with salt and pepper this is the foundation for the soup and it cooks for a good amount of time but it's very hands-off what's happening in the pot and the important part is to kind of go low and slow at the beginning both the leeks and the carrots have a lot of liquid in them and I want all of that liquid to sweat out before the vegetables take on any color and you need a good amount of fat to get that process going and it's gonna look like not much is happening and again that's that's kind of the point I'm gonna turn up the heat just a little bit it should look juicy in the bottom of the pan but if anything feels like it's going very fast or sizzling high or the vegetables are getting browned then that would be a good indication to lower the heat so that takes a while it takes about 15 20 25 minutes to cook that down to where I want to keep going just cover back up it didn't take a little a little cozy nap under there you're not gonna believe me that amazing mound of sofrito after about 15 minutes we'll cook down to something that looks like you didn't even start with anything and at this point my mom would always add a ham hock to the pot or whatever sometimes it was bacon sometimes it was pancetta all of those things would work if you were a vegetarian and you don't want to add any meat products that's fine too I would add a little bit more fat to the pan and this is going to cook in the soup the whole time but I like to give it just a tiny bit of a head start just start rendering some of the fat out of the ham hock one of the things I like about using a ham Hach is that it's gonna add richness you don't get a ton of meat off of it so it's not really about that but I do like that smoky flavor and the saltiness that it gives to the to the soup once that's gone for a couple of minutes just to feel like the ham hock has gotten warmed up I'm going to add the rest of ingredients that go into the soup so the Fazioli or the sizzle we always use white beans I soak these beans overnight these are cannellini ins which soaking just helps the bean cook more evenly it helps it cook more quickly okay what else is going in here this was a 15 ounce can of tomatoes you can use fresh tomatoes if you have them I don't like biting into a big piece of tomato at the end of the day whew we're getting the rind or the stemi part so I'm just gonna chair these you can use canned crushed Tomatoes to just make sure that the brand that you're using doesn't have tomato concentrate or a lot of puree in the ingredients because that will just thicken the soup a little bit too much and it won't have that this kind of nice tomato e but light frothy texture comes out to like six tomatoes with their liquid so if you have a bigger can you can also just scoop out a couple of cups and then start from there and this is the tomato liquid so the next thing that's going in this is one bunch of kale just strips if you can tear them into smaller pieces you can leave them in big pieces the soup is going to cook for at least an hour and maybe three a couple of bay leaves so obviously this doesn't look like see if it looks like a mound of kale I'm going to stir it around a little bit but depending on how much liquid you had with your beans you're definitely going to need to add more we want to make sure that the beans are submerged in liquid I'll use stock plus whatever water is laying around there's a lot of flavor in the beans and in all of the veg we haven't have stock today because we're in the Test Kitchen so I'm just gonna add whatever it takes to cover the beans by a couple of inches yeah so all in all I added about 10 cups of liquid this is about to come to a boil want to make sure everybody is saving their parmesan rinds when you grate down to the bottom of your parm or to your Grana Padano or even your pecorino don't throw the rind away you throw this in to the guy and especially if you're not using the ham hock because you're a vegetarian that harm rind is going to lend an insane amount of flavor saltiness a little bit of richness umami you know that word guys the umami this could take an hour or it could take three the end point for the soup is when the beans are totally tender and creamy you don't want an el dente being you definitely want al dente noodles and you want it to have a little bit low simmer I usually set it up with the lid askew and if the liquid reduces so that the beans are out there in the open air getting exposed top it off again use water no big deal but just make sure that they stay submerged otherwise they'll dry out and get crunchy and your soup will over reduce and be pasty you don't want that so just do it do it thing take it this time quiet it's quiet time now all right it's been a couple of hours the next thing to do is to cook the pasta but you don't want to cook the pasta until you know that your soup is ready and along the way while we were checking to make sure that the beans were submerged and there was enough liquid in the soup coming around tasting the soup checking the soup seasoning the soup as you go but if you're ready for dinner the next thing to do is to crust the pasta so I know that a lot of people are gonna say why couldn't I just put the pasta into the soup this is like a lot of liquid and it's boiling and now I have a separate pot and I got to do the thing and why are you begging to do that if you cook the pasta in the soup it is going to absorb all of that available liquid so all of this like delicious broth that you've created that you actually want a spoon into when you're eating the pasta the noodles the dried noodle is going to absorb all of that and then in return freakin pasta is gonna give back to the soup starchiness and gumminess so you're gonna end up with a gummy noodle and a thick kind of pasty soup and then you're gonna really regret all of the things that you did so cook the pasta separately growing up it was always D daleney so that's what I'm using but any like small little shape so even a small shell or elbows so I'm just gonna set a timer for like a few minutes less than the pasta package so so if it says 9 minutes cooking for 6 and then they all come together d daleney going into the soup whatever liquid is clinging to these noodles is totally fine because adding them in here is going to add a little bit of starch anyway it's not as much pasta as you would cook if you were cooking pasta for dinner obviously because there's so many other things going on in the soup look at what happened to the parmesan rinds look at this floppy thing there's your parm rinds you don't really want to eat this so I'd definitely take that out the ham hock really gave up all of its love as well so this is what the ham hock looks like and you can just take those whatever pieces of meat and kind of scrape them off the bone um you can take the meat off the bone and kind of cut it into smaller pieces I'm just really just shredding it apart right into the pot because it is absolutely falling apart tender let's get the bone out of there all right so we're actually gonna have customers only for lunch today and the Test Kitchen we got Carol's recipe for pasta fagioli whoo that looks good it's you've also got Bay Leafs unless you'd give out prizes for whoever ends up with the bay leaf in your soup you might want to get rid of that too there's always a little extra cheese to create over when you get to the table this is Parmesan cuz I need to I'm really just in it to get back down to that rind you know a little red pepper flake if you're into that kind of thing I'm not a tiny bit of salt I like a lot of black pepper obviously this is my serving so I get what I want extra drizzle of olive oil which my mom was really the first person to ever show me that that was a thing and it was something that it really does change the flavor of the soup and that's why we always call for extra virgin because you want to use something that tastes delicious and then obviously if you have pasta and beans and all of this other richness the new to need more bread the one thing I knew that I don't have is a spoon I mean now that's a food oh it looks delicious for me I'm just chasing that feeling that the soup that I'm eating is the one that my mom made for us which is where the inspiration for this came and the from the beginning so if I can make it tastes like hers then I feel like I nailed it and it's pretty close that's really good Oh first pick of dessert for the Bailey if get to skip your shower not only a buzz to small humans who are constantly trying to get out of bathing I feel like when you become an adult you're not like looking for reasons not to be I love anywayoh no you did Selenia oh no you did Aaliyah need okay that's the time all right today I'm making one of my all-time favorite dishes it combines two of my all-time favorite things which is pasta and beans and this is one of the dishes that my mom made so recently I was digging around in this old book bougie alley on pasta which is not where the recipe for this pasta fagioli comes from except I was flipping through it and I found inside handwritten notes that I took when I was in college and I was this was from a phone call home to my mom saying how do you make pasta fagioli so this is that recipe which is her recipe which is now your recipe there are three most important things that go into the soup are your sofrito which is the vegetable foundation for the soup which in this case is carrot and leek and garlic and it's not just the ingredients but the way that you get your sofrito to the right end point that's important and then the other elements are the cooking the beans cooking the pasta and bringing it all together so I'm going to start with you always start with your sofrito and different cultures have different things that they put in their sofrito generally always have a carrot an onion or a leek in this case it's a leek and always garlic and another thing that I like to do is I just blitz all of these vegetables the only thing that I'll do separately is just drop the garlic in and get that started a lot of people when they talk to me about making soup complain that their soup is bland and they can't figure out how to get more flavor into it and I really do think that the key to a super flavorful soup super flavorful soup is starting with the sofrito and really cooking it for a long time so it's not like a quick saute of vegetables that you would do for a stir-fry or if you were doing fried rice or something like that so I'm just gonna blitz these more so they're finely chopped more surface area they kind of dissolve so I don't want this to go all the way to where puree because then it would be too wet and it'll burn and it won't have any integrity left so this is just really finely chopped vegetables and this looks like an enormous amount and that's kind of the point it's gonna cook down so much its voluminous on purpose okay yeah if you don't like carrots who doesn't like carrot people don't like celery I think everyone no one really has a problem with carrots I think that's a made-up thing so that was a third of a cup of extra-virgin olive oil really this doesn't have to be super hot I don't want it to get a ton of color at the beginning so I'm adding all of the veg at once and I'm gonna season this right off the bat with salt and pepper this is the foundation for the soup and it cooks for a good amount of time but it's very hands-off what's happening in the pot and the important part is to kind of go low and slow at the beginning both the leeks and the carrots have a lot of liquid in them and I want all of that liquid to sweat out before the vegetables take on any color and you need a good amount of fat to get that process going and it's gonna look like not much is happening and again that's that's kind of the point I'm gonna turn up the heat just a little bit it should look juicy in the bottom of the pan but if anything feels like it's going very fast or sizzling high or the vegetables are getting browned then that would be a good indication to lower the heat so that takes a while it takes about 15 20 25 minutes to cook that down to where I want to keep going just cover back up it didn't take a little a little cozy nap under there you're not gonna believe me that amazing mound of sofrito after about 15 minutes we'll cook down to something that looks like you didn't even start with anything and at this point my mom would always add a ham hock to the pot or whatever sometimes it was bacon sometimes it was pancetta all of those things would work if you were a vegetarian and you don't want to add any meat products that's fine too I would add a little bit more fat to the pan and this is going to cook in the soup the whole time but I like to give it just a tiny bit of a head start just start rendering some of the fat out of the ham hock one of the things I like about using a ham Hach is that it's gonna add richness you don't get a ton of meat off of it so it's not really about that but I do like that smoky flavor and the saltiness that it gives to the to the soup once that's gone for a couple of minutes just to feel like the ham hock has gotten warmed up I'm going to add the rest of ingredients that go into the soup so the Fazioli or the sizzle we always use white beans I soak these beans overnight these are cannellini ins which soaking just helps the bean cook more evenly it helps it cook more quickly okay what else is going in here this was a 15 ounce can of tomatoes you can use fresh tomatoes if you have them I don't like biting into a big piece of tomato at the end of the day whew we're getting the rind or the stemi part so I'm just gonna chair these you can use canned crushed Tomatoes to just make sure that the brand that you're using doesn't have tomato concentrate or a lot of puree in the ingredients because that will just thicken the soup a little bit too much and it won't have that this kind of nice tomato e but light frothy texture comes out to like six tomatoes with their liquid so if you have a bigger can you can also just scoop out a couple of cups and then start from there and this is the tomato liquid so the next thing that's going in this is one bunch of kale just strips if you can tear them into smaller pieces you can leave them in big pieces the soup is going to cook for at least an hour and maybe three a couple of bay leaves so obviously this doesn't look like see if it looks like a mound of kale I'm going to stir it around a little bit but depending on how much liquid you had with your beans you're definitely going to need to add more we want to make sure that the beans are submerged in liquid I'll use stock plus whatever water is laying around there's a lot of flavor in the beans and in all of the veg we haven't have stock today because we're in the Test Kitchen so I'm just gonna add whatever it takes to cover the beans by a couple of inches yeah so all in all I added about 10 cups of liquid this is about to come to a boil want to make sure everybody is saving their parmesan rinds when you grate down to the bottom of your parm or to your Grana Padano or even your pecorino don't throw the rind away you throw this in to the guy and especially if you're not using the ham hock because you're a vegetarian that harm rind is going to lend an insane amount of flavor saltiness a little bit of richness umami you know that word guys the umami this could take an hour or it could take three the end point for the soup is when the beans are totally tender and creamy you don't want an el dente being you definitely want al dente noodles and you want it to have a little bit low simmer I usually set it up with the lid askew and if the liquid reduces so that the beans are out there in the open air getting exposed top it off again use water no big deal but just make sure that they stay submerged otherwise they'll dry out and get crunchy and your soup will over reduce and be pasty you don't want that so just do it do it thing take it this time quiet it's quiet time now all right it's been a couple of hours the next thing to do is to cook the pasta but you don't want to cook the pasta until you know that your soup is ready and along the way while we were checking to make sure that the beans were submerged and there was enough liquid in the soup coming around tasting the soup checking the soup seasoning the soup as you go but if you're ready for dinner the next thing to do is to crust the pasta so I know that a lot of people are gonna say why couldn't I just put the pasta into the soup this is like a lot of liquid and it's boiling and now I have a separate pot and I got to do the thing and why are you begging to do that if you cook the pasta in the soup it is going to absorb all of that available liquid so all of this like delicious broth that you've created that you actually want a spoon into when you're eating the pasta the noodles the dried noodle is going to absorb all of that and then in return freakin pasta is gonna give back to the soup starchiness and gumminess so you're gonna end up with a gummy noodle and a thick kind of pasty soup and then you're gonna really regret all of the things that you did so cook the pasta separately growing up it was always D daleney so that's what I'm using but any like small little shape so even a small shell or elbows so I'm just gonna set a timer for like a few minutes less than the pasta package so so if it says 9 minutes cooking for 6 and then they all come together d daleney going into the soup whatever liquid is clinging to these noodles is totally fine because adding them in here is going to add a little bit of starch anyway it's not as much pasta as you would cook if you were cooking pasta for dinner obviously because there's so many other things going on in the soup look at what happened to the parmesan rinds look at this floppy thing there's your parm rinds you don't really want to eat this so I'd definitely take that out the ham hock really gave up all of its love as well so this is what the ham hock looks like and you can just take those whatever pieces of meat and kind of scrape them off the bone um you can take the meat off the bone and kind of cut it into smaller pieces I'm just really just shredding it apart right into the pot because it is absolutely falling apart tender let's get the bone out of there all right so we're actually gonna have customers only for lunch today and the Test Kitchen we got Carol's recipe for pasta fagioli whoo that looks good it's you've also got Bay Leafs unless you'd give out prizes for whoever ends up with the bay leaf in your soup you might want to get rid of that too there's always a little extra cheese to create over when you get to the table this is Parmesan cuz I need to I'm really just in it to get back down to that rind you know a little red pepper flake if you're into that kind of thing I'm not a tiny bit of salt I like a lot of black pepper obviously this is my serving so I get what I want extra drizzle of olive oil which my mom was really the first person to ever show me that that was a thing and it was something that it really does change the flavor of the soup and that's why we always call for extra virgin because you want to use something that tastes delicious and then obviously if you have pasta and beans and all of this other richness the new to need more bread the one thing I knew that I don't have is a spoon I mean now that's a food oh it looks delicious for me I'm just chasing that feeling that the soup that I'm eating is the one that my mom made for us which is where the inspiration for this came and the from the beginning so if I can make it tastes like hers then I feel like I nailed it and it's pretty close that's really good Oh first pick of dessert for the Bailey if get to skip your shower not only a buzz to small humans who are constantly trying to get out of bathing I feel like when you become an adult you're not like looking for reasons not to be I love anyway\n"