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Recipe: How to make fabada – traditional Asturian bean stew

The hearty Asturian dish is a perfect lunch on a cold day... and don't forget the crusty bread and cider!

Published: 8 November 2019 11:30 CET

Recipe: How to make fabada - traditional Asturian bean stew

Photo: Flavio Lorenzo Sánchez/Flickr

Fabada is a traditional and hearty white bean stew from the northern Spanish region of Asturias. Particularly popular during the colder months, it is traditionally eaten with crusty bread and a glass of Asturian cider.

Luis Valerio from thespanishcuisine.com lets us in on his recipe for the Spanish classic.

Ingredients

15oz of white beans

Two Spanish chorizo

Two Spanish morcilla (black pudding/blood sausage)

One tsp salt

10-12 threads of saffron

The ingredients you need for your fabada. Photo: jimarai/Flickr

Recipe

1. Remove and discard any broken beans.

2. Place the white beans in a large bowl and pour over enough cold water to cover them and set aside overnight to soak (depending on the white bean variety you use, this time could be different).

3. Prick the Spanish chorizo and blood sausages several times all over.

4. Put the soaked white beans, chorizos, blood sausages and one teaspoon of salt in a pot and fill with enough water to cover all the beans, plus one inch more. Make sure the chorizo and blood sausage are above the white beans.

5. Cover the pot, bring it to a boil and simmer over low heat for 30 minutes. Then skim the froth off (to reduce fat), add two – three tablespoons of cold water to stop the boil for an instant, then cover again and continue simmering.

6. Repeat the last step three more times, add the saffron threads and repeat the last step one time more (two and a half hours in total).

7. Transfer the chorizo and blood sausage to a plate, slice them and return them to the pot.

Traditionally this recipe is also cooked with some pork belly and Spanish ham, but you can cook it just with chorizo!

15 oz

Why do they pour cider like that in Spain's Asturias?

They say Asturian blood is 50 percent water and 50 percent cider, and given the 40 million bottles produced every year in the region, it doesn’t seem too hard to believe.

However, it’s the method of serving cider in Asturias which really captures the imagination.

The bottle will either come attached to a contraption which sucks up the cider and splurts it into a wide but thin-rimmed glass.

Or the waiter will come out every few minutes to grab your bottle and glass, lift the former high up with one arm and the latter down low around waist height before pouring some of the cider into the glass from at an arm’s length.

There’s even a verb for this action – escanciar – to decant.

The objective is for the cider to be shaken and aerated so that its natural carbon dioxide ‘awakens’.

When it is poured from above and hits the glass, carbon dioxide bubbles are produced that make the aroma of the cider come alive.

It’s good and normal for there to be splashback when pouring Asturian cider, but the aim is still to get most of it in the glass. (Photo by MIGUEL RIOPA / AFP)

These bubbles go away quickly so once served, the customer should quickly drink the culín (small bottom) up in one swig.

The action of escanciar imitates how cider would be traditionally served when it went directly from big oak barrels to the glass, as cider has been the drink of choice in Asturians since before Roman times.

READ ALSO: Why Spaniards’ habit of drinking alcohol every day is surprisingly healthy

This is after all natural cider which doesn’t come with the sugar, additives and pre-carbonated mixes of brands such as Strongbow, Magners or Kopparberg.

“It took me some time to get the hang of pouring cider, I missed the mark a lot, and my arm used to get very tired at first,” a Latin American waitress at a bar in Gijón told The Local Spain.

Many sidrerías (cider houses) and restaurants have cylindrical tubes on wheels where escanciadores (the waiters in charge of pouring cider) can put the glass in to avoid making a mess on the floor or splashing customers, as there is always some splatter even if they don’t completely miss the mark.

A waiter pours cider for customers at a cider bar in the northern Spanish city of Oviedo (Photo by RAFA RIVAS / AFP)

The more old-school chigres (cider house in Asturian) prefer to have sawdust all over the floor to absorb the spilt cider.

To pour, tirar (throw) or escanciar (decant) cider like an Asturian, you should tilt the bottle slowly from above and aim for the cider to hit the top part of the inside side of the glass, which has to be held at a 45-degree angle. It’s this that brings out the effervescence out in la sidra natural.

So when you visit the beautiful region of Asturias and you tuck into their famously ample servings of fabada asturiana (Asturian bean stew) or cachopo (meat, cheese and ham all together in breadcrumbs), washed down with one or two bottles of sidra, now you’ll understand what’s behind this eye-catching tradition.

READ ALSO: Eight fascinating facts about Spain’s Asturias region

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