Italian Trieste Sauerkraut, Bean and Pork Soup | Jota Triestina
Jota is the winter soup of Trieste and one of the very few Italian dishes built on fermented cabbage. Sauerkraut, dried beans, potatoes and smoked pork go into the pot, a roux of lard and flour goes in at the end, and the result is thick, sour, smoky and heavy in a way nothing else on the peninsula is. It is eaten from November to March and almost never outside those months.
What makes it a serious dish rather than a rustic one is the handling of acidity. Sauerkraut arrives carrying a great deal of lactic acid, and a cook who tips the jar straight into the pot gets a soup that is sharp and one dimensional. The traditional method cooks the beans, the kraut and the pork in three separate pots and marries them only at the end, which lets you decide how sour the finished soup will be instead of finding out.
The other thing to understand is that jota is not finished when it comes off the heat. It is deliberately made a day ahead. The acidity rounds, the beans give up more starch, the smoke moves into the potatoes and the whole thing tightens. A bowl eaten straight from the pot is a good soup; the same bowl eaten a day later is a better one.
Yield: 6 servings. Prep: 30 minutes. Soak: overnight. Cook: 2 hours 15 minutes. Rest: overnight, ideally. Difficulty: intermediate. Course: primo. Region: Friuli Venezia Giulia, Trieste and the Karst.
The Story
The name is older than any of the ingredients. Jota descends from a late Latin word for broth, iutta, which appears in medieval Friulian documents centuries before maize, potatoes or beans were seen in Europe. Whatever the original iutta was, it was a thick pottage of grain and greens, and the word simply stayed attached to the pot while everything inside it was replaced. The version eaten today could not have existed before the seventeenth century, since two of its four main ingredients come from the Americas.
There is more than one jota, and the difference is a map. In Carnia and the Friulian hills the sour element is brovada, turnips fermented whole in crushed grape marc. In Trieste and along the Karst it is capuzi garbi, cabbage salted and fermented in barrels, the same preparation made across Slovenia and Austria. The two soups share a name and taste nothing alike, and Triestines are clear about which is theirs.
The reason is climate. The limestone plateau behind Trieste grows cabbage well and very little else through the winter, and a barrel of salted cabbage in a cold cellar was for centuries the only vegetable a household had between November and March. Add beans for protein, potatoes for bulk and a piece of the pig killed in December for fat and salt, and you have a complete winter meal from a store cupboard. Jota was not designed; it is the arithmetic of what the Karst had.
Trieste gave the dish its final form. As the free port of the Habsburg empire from 1719 the city filled with Slovene, Croatian, Austrian and Italian families, and its eating houses, the buffet triestini, built a whole cuisine on boiled and smoked pork. Jota moved from farm kitchens onto those counters and has stayed there, still served by the ladle in the old buffets of the city centre.
Ingredients
For the beans
Dried borlotti beans, 1 1/4 cups (250 g), soaked overnight
Bay leaf, 1
Garlic clove, whole, 1
Cold water, 5 cups (1.2 L)
For the sauerkraut
Sauerkraut, drained, 1 lb 2 oz (500 g)
Cold water, 3 cups (720 ml)
Bay leaf, 1
Juniper berries, 4
Black peppercorns, 8
For the pork and potatoes
Smoked pork ribs, 12 oz (340 g)
Smoked pancetta in one piece, 4 oz (115 g)
Waxy yellow potatoes, peeled and diced, 14 oz (400 g)
Cold water, 5 cups (1.2 L)
Fine sea salt, 1 tsp (6 g), added late
For the pestada
Lard or pork fatback, finely chopped, 2 oz (55 g)
All purpose flour, 2 tbsp (16 g)
Garlic cloves, finely chopped, 2
Flat leaf parsley leaves, chopped, 2 tbsp (6 g)
For finishing
Extra virgin olive oil, 1 tsp per bowl
Freshly ground black pepper, to taste
Cumin seeds, 1/4 tsp (0.5 g), optional, a Karst habit
Preparation
Soaking and cooking the beans
Cover the beans with three times their volume of cold water the night before and leave them at room temperature 8 to 12 hours. Drain, discard that water and put them in a pot with 5 cups (1.2 L) of fresh cold water, the bay leaf and the whole garlic clove. Simmer gently, uncovered, 60 to 75 minutes until tender. Add no salt: salted water firms the skins and keeps them chalky. Keep the beans in their cooking liquid, which is full of dissolved starch and needed later.
Rinsing and cooking the sauerkraut
Drain the sauerkraut and taste it raw. If it is aggressively sour, rinse it briefly under cold water and squeeze it out; if it is mild, use it as it is. Put it in its own pot with 3 cups (720 ml) of cold water, the bay leaf, juniper and peppercorns, and simmer 40 minutes uncovered. Cooking it separately is the most important decision in this recipe, because it lets you discard as much of the sour liquid as you choose.
Building the smoked pork broth
In a third pot, cover the ribs and the whole piece of pancetta with 5 cups (1.2 L) of cold water and bring them slowly to a bare simmer. Skim carefully for the first ten minutes, then leave them 60 minutes with the surface barely moving. A hard boil drives the fat into the water as an emulsion and gives a greasy soup rather than a smoky one. The meat should come off the rib bones under light pressure.
Cooking the potatoes in the pork broth
Cut the potatoes to about 3/4 inch (2 cm) and add them to the pork pot for its last 20 minutes. They cook in smoked broth rather than water, which is why jota tastes of smoke all the way through and not only where the meat is. When they are soft, crush about a third against the side of the pot with a wooden spoon.
Making the pestada
Melt the chopped lard slowly over low heat until it renders to clear fat. Add the flour and cook it, stirring constantly, 3 to 4 minutes, until it smells nutty and turns the colour of pale straw. Then add the garlic and parsley for 30 seconds only. This is a lard roux, not a soffritto: the flour must lose its raw taste without going brown, because a dark roux turns bitter against the acidity of the kraut.
Joining the three pots
Drain the sauerkraut, keeping its liquid in a jug. Combine the kraut, the beans with their starchy water, the pork broth and the potatoes in the largest pot. Pull the rib meat off the bones, discard bone and gristle, dice the pancetta and return both. Stir in the pestada a spoonful at a time and simmer gently 20 minutes so the flour cooks out and the soup thickens. Add kraut liquid back by the ladle until the sourness is where you want it.
Seasoning and resting
Only now add salt, starting with 1 teaspoon, because the pork, the pancetta and the kraut have all contributed salt already and none of it can be taken out. Grind in black pepper generously and add the cumin if you are using it. Take the pot off the heat for at least 30 minutes, and preferably refrigerate it overnight: reheated the next day the acidity is rounder, the texture denser and the smoke spread through everything.
Plating
Jota is served genuinely hot, in a deep heavy bowl that has been warmed. It is a soup of the coldest weeks of the year and it loses a great deal cooling on the way to the table, so a cold bowl is a real mistake rather than a detail. Ladle from the bottom, since the beans and potato settle and the top of the pot carries almost no solids.
The consistency should be thick enough that the ladle leaves a brief impression before the surface closes. Finish each bowl with a thread of raw olive oil and a heavy grinding of black pepper, and nothing else: no cheese, no herbs, no cream. The traditional accompaniment is dense dark bread and a glass of red, and in the buffets of Trieste it arrives with nothing more.
Professional Technique
The defining technique is the three pot method, and it exists to give the cook control of a variable that is otherwise out of their hands. Every batch of sauerkraut is different: fermentation length, salt level and the age of the jar all change how much lactic acid it carries, and a mild jar and a sharp one can differ by a factor of two. Cooked in one pot with everything else, that acid is fixed from the first minute, and the beans refuse to soften, because acid keeps their cell walls rigid. Cooked separately, the kraut gives up its acid into its own water, and when the pots are joined you decide how much of that water goes back.
The second technique is the lard roux, called pestada here and rossolo in some Triestine kitchens, and it does two jobs. It thickens, but it also coats the tongue with fat and softens the perception of sourness, which is why jota thickened with flour alone tastes sharper than jota carrying the same flour in a proper lard roux. Colour is the control point: pale straw only. A blond roux adds body and a nutty note, while a brown one brings bitter compounds that collide with lactic acid and make the soup taste burnt and sour at once.
The third is the deliberate rest. Overnight the bean and potato starch goes on setting, the fat redistributes, the sharp volatile notes of the fermentation dissipate and the smoke reaches the potato dice. The honest version of this recipe is a two day one.
Texture and Moisture Control
Three thickeners work here and none should do the whole job. The starch from the bean water is the base, the crushed potato is the body, the flour in the pestada is the finish. A jota leaning entirely on flour tastes pasty, one leaning on crushed potato turns gluey, one with neither is thin cabbage broth. Balanced, a spoon dragged across the surface leaves a track that closes slowly.
The sauerkraut has to keep a slight resistance. Forty minutes of separate simmering takes off the raw edge without reducing it to threads, and in the main pot it should get no more than the 20 minutes needed to cook out the flour. Past that it collapses, and with it goes the one element giving the bowl any texture against soft beans and potato.
Moisture is controlled by holding back the kraut liquid rather than by adding water, since it brings acidity and volume together in the proportion the dish wants. Reheating the next day always needs more, because the soup tightens hard in the cold: add it a ladle at a time over low heat and stop while it is still slightly looser than you mean to serve it.
Professional Mise en Place
Three pots run at once here, so the work is front loaded and the assembly is fast. Plan it across two days if you can.
Equipment and tools
Three saucepans plus one pot of at least 6 quarts (6 litres) for the assembly
Fine skimmer for the pork broth
Small heavy pan for the roux, not nonstick, so you can read the colour
Wooden spoon for crushing the potato against the pot wall
Jug to reserve the sauerkraut liquid
Prepared ahead
Beans soaked, drained and cooked in unsalted water up to 2 days ahead
Sauerkraut cooked and drained, its liquid reserved separately and refrigerated
Pork broth made and the meat picked off the bones, held in a little broth
Pestada chopped and ready but cooked only when it is needed
The complete soup made the day before and refrigerated overnight, the best version
Service setup
Deep bowls warmed properly, since the soup is served very hot
Reserved kraut liquid and hot water at hand to correct acidity and consistency
Olive oil and a pepper mill at the pass
Dark bread cut and ready, the only accompaniment the dish takes
Chef Tips
Buy sauerkraut sold refrigerated in brine rather than the pasteurised kind in a can. Canned kraut has usually been cooked twice and collapses to threads in the pot, and its acidity is flat and vinegary instead of clean. Taste whatever you buy before planning the recipe around it.
If you can find musetto, the soft Friulian cooking sausage of the muzzle and rind, poach it separately and slice it into the bowls at the end. It is the traditional addition in Trieste and it brings gelatin and spice that the ribs alone do not.
Judge the acidity twice: once when you add the kraut liquid back, and again after the overnight rest, when it will have softened noticeably. Adding acid is easy and removing it is not, so stop short on the first day.
Keep a cup of the bean cooking water when you store the soup. It is the best thing to loosen jota with on the second day, because it restores volume without diluting either the starch or the salt.
Common Mistakes
Cooking everything in one pot. Beans will not soften properly in acidic liquid, and the sourness of the finished soup becomes whatever the jar happened to be. The three pot method exists so both of those stay under your control.
Salting the beans early. Salt in the cooking water firms the skins and can leave the centres chalky after well over an hour. Cook them plain and season only the assembled soup.
Browning the roux. A dark roux brings bitter notes that collide with lactic acid and make the soup taste burnt and sour together. Take the flour only to pale straw, about 3 to 4 minutes, then pull it off the heat.
Boiling the pork. A rolling boil emulsifies the fat into the broth and the soup turns greasy on the lips instead of smoky on the palate. Hold a bare simmer for the full hour and skim the first ten minutes properly.
Serving it the same hour. Straight off the heat the acidity is still sharp and separate and the texture is loose. Thirty minutes is the minimum and a night in the refrigerator is the real answer.
Wine Pairing
Refosco dal Peduncolo Rosso Friuli DOC: The native red of these hills and the pairing Trieste actually pours. Its acidity is unusually high for a red, which is what lets it stand beside fermented cabbage instead of being flattened by it, and the firm dark plum fruit and herbal bitterness on the finish cut rendered lard and smoked rib fat. Serve it at around 61°F (16°C).
Schioppettino Friuli Colli Orientali DOC: The more aromatic choice from the same province. Schioppettino carries a pronounced black pepper and wild berry perfume that meets the peppercorns and juniper in the kraut directly rather than by accident, and its tannin is moderate enough to leave the soft beans and potato alone. A bottle with a few years on it suits the dish better than a very young one.
Teroldego Rotaliano DOC: A short step west into Trentino and a reliable answer when Friulian bottles are hard to find. Deep black cherry fruit, fresh acidity and a bitter almond close give it the structure to carry a heavy bowl, and the smoky note common in the variety runs alongside the cured pork. Generous without being sweet, which matters against a sour soup.
Alto Adige DOC Lagrein: The most powerful pairing here and the one for a January bowl made with musetto. Lagrein is dense and dark with grippy tannin and a cocoa edge, and that tannin scours fat from the palate in a way lighter reds cannot. Keep it for the richest version, since it overwhelms a jota made with lean pork.
Storage & Reheating
Jota keeps better than almost any soup in the Italian repertoire. Airtight in the refrigerator it holds 4 days and improves for the first two, since the acidity of the kraut is itself a preservative. Cool it fast in a wide shallow container and refrigerate it once it has stopped steaming.
It freezes for up to 3 months, which is unusual for a soup containing potato, and it survives because the potato here is meant to break down anyway. Use rigid containers filled to about 1 inch (2.5 cm) below the rim and thaw overnight in the refrigerator rather than in a microwave.
Reheat slowly over medium low heat, stirring from the bottom so the flour in the pestada does not catch and scorch. It will have set almost solid in the cold, so loosen it with hot water or reserved bean liquid a ladle at a time and stop while it still moves. Bring it fully hot but never to a rolling boil, taste for salt again, and add the raw olive oil and pepper only in the bowl.
Nutrition
Per serving, based on 6 servings:
Calories: 455 kcal
Total Fat: 21 g
Saturated Fat: 8 g
Trans Fat: 0 g
Unsaturated Fat: 12 g
Cholesterol: 48 mg
Sodium: 1080 mg
Total Carbohydrates: 42 g
Fiber: 11 g
Total Sugars: 4 g
Added Sugars: 0 g
Protein: 21 g
Principal micronutrients: vitamin C and vitamin K from the fermented cabbage, potassium, iron, folate, thiamine, zinc
These figures are estimates. Sodium is the figure that moves most: rinsing the kraut and blanching the ribs before cooking can take it down by a third.
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