Pochas a la Navarra

Pochas a la Navarra belong to Navarra, especially to the late summer market, when the white beans are shelled fresh before they ever dry. That is what makes the dish what it is: not a dried bean pot, not a pork stew, but tender young pochas cooked with a vegetable sofrito, the slow onion base, until they melt like butter. Cocina de cuchara, spoon food, but light on its feet.

The method that decides it is gentleness. Fresh pochas don't need soaking and they don't forgive a hard boil. Cover them with cold water, bring them up slowly, and keep the pot at a quiet tremble while the onion, green pepper, tomato, and garlic cook down in olive oil until sweet and thick. That sofrito gives the broth its body. Rush it and you get beans in pale water, and nobody waited all year for that.

If you are far from Navarra, no hace falta haber pisado España. Use frozen fresh shelling beans if you can find them, or fresh borlotti, cranberry, or cannellini beans from the pod. They will taste a little different and may take longer, but the rule is the same: cook them gently and salt near the end. Dried white beans work only as a different pot, soaked overnight and simmered longer. Good, yes. Pochas, no.

Serve them loose and brothy, with piparras, the pickled green chillies of the north, on the side if you have them. In my Margin beside this one I wrote: "sin prisa, sin carne," without hurry, without meat. Siempre sale, si lo sigues.