Recipe: Portuguese Bean Soup (for days)

I encourage you to make this fancier with the best ingredients you have available

I’m back in Philly for a minute and it’s weirdly cold so I’m fixated on soup. For the Inquirer, I’ve been working on a piece tracing the Philly cheesesteak’s development and history and it’s been pretty maddening because 1. I don’t eat cheesesteaks except the Frizwit so I don’t actually care about the history and 2. a lot of my research has brought me to the Cheesesteak Guru Facebook group, and most the group’s members are fixated on eating cheesesteaks made from well, crap ingredients, but dissecting and discussing the steaks like they’re fine wine.

But as quick as I am to dismiss the average cheesesteak as crap, I understand that I come from a place where we make really delicious food from frequently not great ingredients. So below I’ve got a version of the Portuguese Bean Soup that’s based on the Punahou recipe (go big buff n blue) that I’ve riffed on a hundred times, always with better ingredients.

I wrestle with provenance of ingredients all the time. Growing up, we used to sub out half the white rice for brown rice and that was “healthy” — but we all consumed copious amounts of Spam, mayo, industrially produced ingredients, etc. And when I write recipes (especially the ones I develop for EatingWell), I’m constantly juggling the adherence to ingredients of cultural import and what I want to actually consume.

So in italics and in the photo above, I’m showing you the ingredients I actually used to make my last batch of Portuguese Bean Soup. Yes, I did happen to have a Redondo’s sausage, so there was that, but why use canned humdrum kidney beans when you can get meaty, smoky, rare beans from a company like Primary Beans? Why use tomatoes out of season when you have fancy preserved tomatoes in your cupboard? And why use run of the mill Bertolli macaroni or whatever, when honestly, any pasta will do? So upgrade your pasta, and all the rest.

It’ll still taste ‘onolicious. Most likely, even better.

For a quick interlude, my recently published articles:

How potential tariffs on Mexico are already affecting restaurants — not to mention the price of tequila and mezcal, March 2025

(This one above is now a little out of date because it was published right before this administration put out its new dumb, all-encompassing tariffs that make me fear for…everything.

So are the new Middle Child sandwiches at PHL any good? April 2025

And a continuation of my new column for the Inquirer: “Hands, Please.”

Eggs come from chickens. So why are eggs expensive and not chickens? April 2025

A bonus for subscribing to this Substack…I post the gift links of my Inquirer articles here (this wasn’t always the case, but I am now committed to this change).

And please, I really need you guys to email any kitchen, food, food system, chef questions: chef@inquirer.com

Also, our collaboration with Fishtown Pickles is now live:

fishtownpickles

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Portuguese Bean Soup

Serves 40 (people or times you reheat a bowl for yourself)

· 2 Redondo’s Portuguese sausages, saved from the last dozen you brought home from Hawaii, defrosted and diced Yes, you can use Mexican longaniza or chorizo for this

· 2 large (29 oz) cans kidney beans or whatever fancy Primary Beans you want

· 1 pound smoked ham hocks

· 4-6 large white potatoes, cubed

· 6-8 large carrots, peeled and diced into the same size as the potatoes

· 3 onions, diced

· 2 quarts pureed tomato guts because you’ve used the tomatoes themselves for lomi salmon / whatever canned tomatoes you have

· Kosher salt or white Hawaiian sea salt

· Ground black pepper seriously use the good stuff here, like say from Burlap and Barrel, and use a lot of it

· 1 box macaroni, or more if you like your soup full of noodles In Philly, I’ll use Pasta Lab’s Radiatore, it’s amazing — I’ve also used tiny fancy pasta from Bologna

The method is paywalled because I gotta, but I’m sure you can figure it out even if you’re a free subscriber!

One more interlude:

I’m working on a guide to Honolulu food for the Inquirer and here’s a sneak peek of some of my favorites spots, which will appear in it.

kikiaranita

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And I was back on Kauai to see my family and give my Uncle Ronnie send off filled with love, aloha, and incredible food:

kikiaranita

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