A watercolour of a thick soup of small pasta and white beans in tomato broth
Generated with OpenAI gpt-image-1
Adapted from Pasta e fagioli

Pasta e fagioli

An established dish converted to shelf-stable ingredients. Every substitution is documented below.

How long it keeps

About 6 months, set by Olive oil.

Indicative, for planning a build before you buy. The answer for a pack you already own is the best before date printed on it, and that only holds if it has been stored as the label says.

Serves
4
Burners
1
Pans
1
Water
0.8 L
Active
10 min
Total
30 min

Ingredients

One pan, and the pasta is cooked in the soup rather than drained, which is what thickens it. Draining the pasta separately gives you a thin tomato broth with pasta in it.

  1. Oil, dried onion and garlic two minutes. Herbs in.
  2. Drained carrots, chopped small, two minutes.
  3. Passata, stock cube, 500 ml water. Brought up to a simmer.
  4. Pasta straight in. Cook for the time on the packet, stirring more often than you would in water, because it will catch.
  5. Drained beans in for the last five minutes. Crush a handful against the pan.
  6. Rest it two minutes off the heat before eating. It thickens noticeably.

Serves 4. More water makes it a soup, less makes it almost a stew, and both are correct.

What this was adapted from

Pasta e fagioli: the Italian soup of pasta and beans, thickened by the starch of both

  • dried beans cooked from scratch → tinned cannellini

    The traditional version uses the bean cooking liquid as the body of the soup. Tinned beans have no such liquid worth using, so the pasta is cooked in the soup instead and supplies the starch that would have come from the beans.

  • soffritto of fresh carrot, celery and onion → dried onion and tinned carrot

    Celery has no shelf-stable form worth carrying. Losing it costs the dish a savoury note, which the stock cube partly covers.