italian-style escarole & beans

By michele080478

This is my version of the classic recipe, which has been vetted as authentic by our Italian-American food-bigot friend Victor, who views any not-Italian food with suspicion at best. It is definitely one of those recipes where the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.

Ingredients

• 1 onion, sliced
• 2 -3 cloves garlic, peeled and thinly sliced
• generous amount olive oil to saute (I use extra virgin, as I think it tastes nice)
• head of escarole or other bitter green
• can of chicken broth
• can of white beans
• salt, pepper, and red pepper flakes to taste

Preparation

Step 1

Saute sliced onion in olive oil till softened, then add garlic slices and saute those till softened (use enough oil so they don't get dry or hard, or burn while you're sauteeing the greens). Add sliced up head of escarole, or other bitter green, and saute until wilted and fairly soft -- you want them pretty well sauteed before you add liquid, at least for escarole, because it tempers the bitterness. Add some pepper and red pepper flakes, if you like. Add a can of chicken broth. Braise a good long time till the greens are getting silky soft and delicious, then add a drained & rinsed can of white beans, and braise a little longer to flavor them up and blend everything (the broth thickens up just a hair from the bean starch). Cover at any point if you think the broth is disappearing too quickly. Salt to taste.
It's just lovely as it is, with some bread and cheese as accompaniment, but you can also add chicken sausage or other cooked meat to make a heartier stew-like dish. The key is to not wuss out on cooking the greens longer than you may think is strictly necessary, at both the saute and braise stages, because when they get all soft and olive green, that's when they taste most delicious. (I would even make so bold as to suggest that this might be the sort of thing that Marcella Hazan has in mind when she talks about insaporire as the wellspring of Italian food's astounding yumminess. Roughly translated it means "to make flavorful," and the general idea is to cook your aromatics (onion, celery, carrot, peppers, whatever) slowly in fat, building up layers of caramelization and flavors, before firing up the heat and adding the ingredient which is intended to be 'insaporato': given the flavor you just lovingly built up in the supporting ingredients. I think the beans are the target in a greens-n-beans recipe like this.)