Bellunese Polenta and Beans with Lardo and Garlic | Polenta e Fagioli alla Bellunese
In the Dolomite valleys above Belluno this is not a recipe, it is a season. Fasoi e polenta is what the province ate through the winter for four hundred years, and the version worth writing down is the local one: Lamon beans cooked slowly in their own broth, a pestà of lardo and garlic melted into them, and cornmeal cooked stiff in a copper pot and turned out beside the bowl.
What separates it from every other bean and cornmeal dish in Italy is the fat. There are no olive trees in the Bellunese and there never were, so the flavour comes from cured pork back fat beaten with garlic and parsley on a board until it is a pale paste, then dissolved into the pan at low heat. That single step, five minutes of work, is the whole character of the dish.
Yield: 6 servings. Soaking: 12 hours. Prep: 25 minutes. Cook: 2 hours 15 minutes. Difficulty: easy but long. Course: primo piatto. Region: Veneto, the province of Belluno and the Lamon plateau.
The Story
The bean came first, and it came from a scholar. Pierio Valeriano, a humanist born in Belluno in 1477, was given a packet of bean seed by Pope Clement VII in the 1530s, brought back from the Americas and still a curiosity in Europe. He sent it home to his own valley. On the plateau of Lamon, at around 2,300 feet (700 m), with cool nights and the mineral soil of the Dolomite foothills, those beans produced what the plains could not: a thin skin, a floury interior and a sweetness that survives long cooking. The Fagiolo di Lamon della Vallata Bellunese carries a European IGP today, in four ecotypes, Spagnolit, Spagnolo, Calonega and Canalino.
Maize arrived in the same century and settled into the mountains harder than anywhere else, because nothing else grew there in quantity. The local variety, mais sponcio, takes its name from the sharp point on each kernel and gives a coarse yellow meal with a stronger flavour than the hybrids that replaced it. It was nearly lost after the war and has been brought back by a handful of growers in the valley. Polenta from it is grainier and darker, and it is the correct thing to cook here.
The Bellunese were poor and they emigrated, to Brazil, to the Swiss and Austrian building sites, to the ice cream shops of Germany that Val di Zoldo still supplies. What stayed behind was a cooking with three axes: beans, cornmeal and pork fat. Lardo was kept salted in a wooden box under the eaves and shaved off through the winter, and beating it with garlic into a pestà made a little of it flavour a whole pot.
Ingredients
For the beans
Dried Lamon borlotti beans, 2 cups (400 g)
Cold water for soaking, 8 cups (1.9 L)
Cold water for cooking, 10 cups (2.4 L)
Bay leaves, 2
Fresh sage sprig, 1
Fine sea salt, 2 tsp (12 g), added at the end
For the pesta of lardo and garlic
Lardo, cured pork back fat, 3 oz (85 g)
Garlic cloves, peeled, 3
Flat leaf parsley, chopped, 2 tbsp (8 g)
Yellow onion, finely chopped, 1 medium (150 g)
Fresh rosemary, chopped, 1 tsp (1 g)
Freshly ground black pepper, 1/2 tsp (1 g)
For the polenta
Coarse stone ground yellow cornmeal, mais sponcio if available, 2 cups (330 g)
Water, 8 cups (1.9 L)
Coarse sea salt, 1 tbsp (18 g)
For finishing
Extra virgin olive oil, 2 tbsp (30 ml), or a little more melted lardo
Piave DOP cheese, grated, 1/4 cup (25 g), optional
Freshly ground black pepper, to taste
Preparation
Soaking the Lamon beans
Look the beans over and throw out any that are split, then cover them with the cold soaking water in a bowl wide enough that they can double. Leave them 12 hours at cool room temperature. Drain and discard that water: it holds the oligosaccharides that make beans hard to digest. Lamon beans have a fine skin and hydrate faster than a commercial borlotto, so do not push the soak past 14 hours or the skins slip.
Cooking the beans in unsalted water
Put the drained beans in a heavy pot with the 10 cups (2.4 L) of fresh cold water, the bay and the sage. Bring them up slowly, uncovered, and once the first bubbles appear lower the heat until the surface barely moves. Cook 1 hour 15 minutes to 1 hour 45 minutes depending on their age, and add no salt yet. Skim the grey foam of the first ten minutes and keep them covered by an inch (2.5 cm) of liquid. They are done when one crushes to a cream with no chalk at the centre.
Pounding the pesta
While the beans cook, lay the lardo on a board and chop it with the garlic, parsley and rosemary, working the blade back and forth until the fat and the herbs stop being separate things and become a single pale paste. A mezzaluna is the right tool and two minutes is enough. Do not use a blender: the friction warms the fat and it turns greasy instead of creamy. This paste is the pestà, and it is the entire seasoning of the dish.
Melting the pesta and softening the onion
Put the pestà into a cold pan with the chopped onion over the lowest heat you have. The fat should weep out slowly rather than fry, and the onion should go translucent over 12 to 15 minutes without taking colour. Grind in the black pepper near the end. If the pan sizzles audibly the heat is too high, and browned garlic here is a flaw you taste in every spoonful.
Building the soup and passing part of it
Salt the beans now they are tender and give them 5 minutes to take it up. Lift out about a third with a slotted spoon and pass them through a food mill, or press them through a sieve, back into the pot. That purée is what gives the soup its body and the reason no flour is needed. Stir in the pestà with the onion and all the fat from its pan and simmer, uncovered, for 20 minutes. Remove the bay and the sage.
Cooking the polenta in a wide pot
Bring the 8 cups (1.9 L) of water to the boil with the coarse salt in a wide heavy pot, ideally unlined copper. Pour the cornmeal in slowly through the fingers of one hand while stirring hard with a wooden stick in the other. Once it thickens, reduce the heat so the polenta plops rather than spits and cook 50 minutes to 1 hour, stirring every few minutes and always the same way round.
Turning out the polenta and serving
The polenta is ready when it comes away from the side of the pot in one mass and a film has formed on the bottom. Tip it onto a wooden board, let it stand 3 minutes to firm, and cut it with a length of thread drawn under and up through the mass, never a knife, which drags. Ladle the beans into warm deep bowls, set two slices beside each, and finish with oil and pepper.
Plating
This is mountain food and it should look like it. Deep warm bowls thick enough to hold heat, and a wooden board carried to the table whole so that people cut their own polenta. Ladle the beans high enough that the surface is broad, because the soup gives off its smell as it sits and that smell is half the pleasure.
Keep the polenta outside the bowl. The two are eaten together, a piece on the fork with a spoonful of beans, and the moment it is submerged it softens and the contrast between a dense slice and a loose broth disappears. Thread the oil over the beans in a thin line, grind pepper generously, and offer the Piave in a small bowl rather than dusting every serving.
Nothing green goes on top. The parsley in this dish lives inside the pestà, pounded with the fat hours earlier, and raw leaves at the end put a bright note on a plate built entirely on slow ones.
Professional Technique
The pestà is a cold emulsion technique worth understanding rather than copying. Cured back fat at refrigerator temperature is firm enough to cut cleanly, and repeated chopping breaks the adipose cells and releases fat around the fragments of garlic and herb, binding everything into a paste that holds. Warm the same fat and the cells release it all at once into a loose oily smear that carries the garlic far less evenly. Work cold, work with a blade, and stop as soon as the paste is uniform.
Salting late is the second control and it is specific to dried beans. Salt in the cooking water slows the hydration of the cotyledon while doing nothing for the skin, so beans salted from the start finish soft outside and chalky in the middle, the one fault this dish cannot hide. Salt added once the interior has gone creamy seasons through in minutes, because the bean is already saturated. The same logic keeps acid out: a spoonful of tomato or vinegar early on stops the skins softening altogether.
The thickening is done by the beans themselves. Milling a third releases the starch of the cotyledon into the broth, where it gelatinises and holds the suspension, giving a soup that stays homogeneous on the spoon without flour or cream. The proportion matters: a quarter leaves it thin, half turns it into a purée with beans floating in it.
Texture and Moisture Control
Cornmeal ground coarse behaves differently from the fine meal used for soft polenta. The particles are large, they hydrate from the outside inward, and they need both time and a generous ratio of water. At 8 cups (1.9 L) to 2 cups (330 g) the mixture looks alarmingly loose for twenty minutes and then tightens steadily as the starch swells. Resist adding meal to hurry it: a polenta thickened by quantity rather than time is stiff and raw at once, and on a board it cracks rather than slices.
The beans move the other way. They keep drinking their own broth as they stand, so a soup that looked correct in the pot is noticeably thicker twenty minutes later. Finish it looser than seems right, hold back a cup of the bean cooking liquid, and adjust with that rather than water, since it carries starch and salt already.
Temperature holds the two textures apart. The polenta should be hot but set, firm enough that a slice stands on the fork, which happens around 150°F (65°C) as it cools on the board. The beans should be hotter, just off the simmer. That difference is what makes each forkful read as two things rather than one.
Professional Mise en Place
Long cooking, short assembly. Beans and polenta run on separate burners for the last hour, so the work is front loaded into the day before.
Equipment and tools
Heavy pot of 6 quarts (5.7 L) for the beans
Wide heavy pot, unlined copper if possible, for the polenta
Mezzaluna and a wooden board for the pestà
Food mill with the medium disc, or a sieve and a ladle
Wooden stick or long spoon, a wooden board and a length of kitchen thread
Prepared ahead
Beans sorted and soaked, the night before
Pestà chopped and covered, up to 1 day ahead in the refrigerator
Onion chopped fine, on the day
Bean soup cooked complete, up to 2 days ahead, since it improves
Kettle of boiling water for topping up the beans
Service setup
Bean soup at a bare simmer, reserved bean liquid beside it
Polenta finishing its last ten minutes, stirred often
Wooden board wiped damp so the polenta releases cleanly
Deep bowls warming, oil and pepper mill on the table
Piave grated into a small bowl, offered separately
Chef Tips
Buy the beans from the current harvest and ask when they were dried. A bean three years old will cook for four hours and still have a hard core, because the skin has cross linked with age and no longer lets water through. In the valley Lamon beans are sold with the year on the bag.
Use lardo, not pancetta and not bacon. Pancetta brings cured meat flavour, smoked bacon brings phenols that fight the beans, and both leave solid pieces in a dish that should be smooth. Lardo disappears completely into the pot and leaves behind sweetness and body rather than pork.
Wipe the wooden board with a damp cloth before the polenta goes on it. A dry board pulls moisture out where it touches and the slab sticks; a slightly wet one releases it in a single clean piece.
Cook double the beans. The soup is better on the second day, when the starch has fully hydrated and the garlic has rounded off, and cold polenta sliced and grilled the next evening is the best thing to eat with it.
Common Mistakes
Salting the beans at the start. Salt in the cooking water slows the softening of the interior while leaving the skin to collapse, and the result is a bean that is soft outside and chalky in the middle. Salt only once a bean crushes to cream between the fingers.
Frying the pestà. The fat and garlic must melt at the lowest heat over a quarter of an hour. Anything hot enough to sizzle browns the garlic, and burnt garlic in a pestà runs through the whole pot and cannot be removed.
Blending instead of chopping. A machine blade warms the back fat and breaks it into an oily smear rather than a paste, and the garlic turns sharp. A mezzaluna on a cold board takes two minutes and gives a different result.
Adding cornmeal to thicken the polenta. Coarse meal thickens by hydrating, not by quantity, and extra meal leaves raw particles in a stiff mass. Hold the ratio, keep the heat low and give it the full hour.
Putting the polenta in the bowl. Submerged in hot soup a slice softens within a minute and the dish becomes one texture. Serve it on the board or the side of the plate.
Wine Pairing
Valpolicella Classico DOC: The everyday red of the Veneto and the natural bottle for a Veneto bean pot. Corvina gives sour cherry fruit and a bitter almond twist on the finish, with light tannin and enough acidity to cut the pork fat without stripping the sweetness from the beans. Take the plain Classico rather than a Ripasso, whose extra weight would sit on top of the dish, and serve it at 57°F (14°C).
Bardolino DOC: Lighter again, from the morainic hills on the eastern shore of Lake Garda, and the right answer when the pestà has been generous. It is pale, low in tannin and high in freshness, with red currant fruit and a faint peppery note that follows the black pepper on the bowl. With so little structure to it, it refreshes between mouthfuls instead of competing with a dish that is already dense.
Teroldego Rotaliano DOC: From the gravel plain of the Campo Rotaliano, across the mountains from Belluno, and the most substantial choice here. Deep colour, dark berry fruit and a savoury almost tarry edge give it enough presence for the lardo, while its acidity stays high enough to keep the pairing from turning heavy. The bottle for a cold evening and a second helping.
Refosco dal Peduncolo Rosso Friuli DOC: The neighbouring alpine red, from the hills east of the Piave, with a distinctly herbal and slightly bitter register. That bitterness is the point: it echoes the garlic and rosemary of the pestà instead of contrasting with them, and the firm acidity handles the starch of both beans and polenta.
Storage & Reheating
The bean soup keeps refrigerated in a sealed container for 4 days and is better on the second day. Keep the reserved bean liquid in a jar beside it, because the soup sets almost solid when cold. Cooked polenta keeps 3 days wrapped closely and firms as it chills, which is useful rather than a problem.
Reheat the beans over low heat with a ladle of the reserved liquid, stirring from the bottom, and bring them only to a bare simmer. A hard boil breaks the skins and turns a soup with whole beans into a coarse purée. Slices of cold polenta go onto a hot dry griddle with no fat and are left alone 4 minutes a side, until a crust forms and they lift away by themselves.
The soup freezes for up to 3 months in portions, though the beans soften a little on thawing; defrost it overnight in the refrigerator. Polenta freezes in cut slices separated by paper and grills from frozen. Do not freeze the pestà alone: the salt in the lardo accelerates the oxidation of the fat and it tastes stale within weeks.
Nutrition
Per serving, based on 6 servings including the polenta and the optional cheese:
Calories: 610 kcal
Total Fat: 18 g
Saturated Fat: 7 g
Trans Fat: 0 g
Unsaturated Fat: 10 g
Cholesterol: 18 mg
Sodium: 780 mg
Total Carbohydrates: 88 g
Fiber: 15 g
Total Sugars: 4 g
Added Sugars: 0 g
Protein: 21 g
Lactose: 0.2 g, from the optional Piave only
Principal micronutrients: iron, folate, potassium, magnesium, manganese, thiamine, zinc
These figures are estimates. The fibre and the iron come almost entirely from the beans, and the sodium depends on how salty the lardo is. Allergens: milk, only if the Piave is used. The dish contains no wheat.
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