White bean and sausage soup is a simple and cozy easy dinner solution. This quick soup recipe requires only a little hands-on prep time, yielding a delicious, filling meal the whole family will enjoy.
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What kind of soup is frugal, filling, simple to make, nourishing, and delicious?
Well, many kinds of soup are all those things, and none more so than bean soup made with simple, quality ingredients.
This creamy white bean soup gets its flavor from both the veggies and kielbasa. The beans are carefully prepared to be easy to digest, though you can also use canned beans. The whole thing comes together quickly!
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While many of us love bean soup, chili, and all sorts of bean dishes, others can have a hard time digesting beans. The musical fruit is worse than merely musical for some people! There are biological reasons for this, and we can do a lot to make beans easier and more comfortable to digest.
Not only can we minimize the trouble beans cause for some of us, but the preparation process makes the nutritional content of the beans more available. So even if you have no problem at all with beans, preparation makes them more nourishing. It is simple to do!
Prepare Beans for Digestion and Nutrition
Beans are a frugal and somewhat nutritious food, and they form the basis of some favorite dishes. They have some downsides, though.
Lectins in beans can be hard on our digestion. Happily, we can reduce the lectins pretty easily.
Phytic acid in beans (and nuts, seeds, and grains) can rob us of minerals and disrupt enzymes we need for digestion. For this reason, some people call it an “anti-nutrient.” Not what we want if we are trying to improve our health, or even just maintain it! We can combat this fairly easily; read more here.
In reality, various methods of preparing beans for maximum nutrition and digestive comfort are rattling around the cooking world. Figure out what works best for you! I use my own mashup of the GAPS method of preparing beans and a pressure cooking hypothesis.
If you follow the GAPS diet, you know that pressure cooking is not GAPS approved. Soaking is GAPS compliant, and is common around the world.
We are not strictly following the GAPS diet at the moment, and aren’t totally committed to any one set of ideas about health and nutrition to the exclusion of all others. So I ended up combining methods, which not only seems effective for us, but also is easy and convenient.
Typically, I prepare a big bag of beans and freeze some for another recipe, usually in portions roughly similar to a can of beans.
If pressure cooking isn’t for you, note that the above article suggests that boiling them thoroughly is also effective at making beans better for you. So you have options…
How to Prepare Beans
You need to start this a day before you plan to have the soup. Here is what I do:
- Sort the dry beans and put them in a large bowl with filtered water to cover. Add a couple of tablespoons of whey or apple cider vinegar.
- Cover and set aside at room temperature. I usually try for 24 hours, but if all I can manage is 12 hours, I do that! If I let them go longer than 24 hours, I drain and add fresh water.
- Drain, rinse, and pressure cook according to the manufacturer’s instructions. I use an instant pot for 20 minutes.
- If I don’t pressure cook, I boil them in a pot of water on the stove, making sure they get nice and soft.
How to Make Creamy White Bean and Sausage Soup
Start with the vegetables. I used frozen this time, and other times I chop them up fresh. I love the convenience of these store bought, chopped veggies for busy days! Onions, carrots, celery, and bell pepper, plus plenty of fresh garlic give the soup plenty of flavor and nutrition. Of course, soup is flexible, so you can change the vegetables to suit your needs and preferences.
Sauté the vegetables until soft, then stir in chopped kielbasa. I like this brand; it is free of preservatives, sugar, and any other questionable items. Made of grass fed beef, it tastes absolutely delicious! It is not the cheapest out there, for sure, and I don’t use a lot. I get it from Costco.
To the veggies and kielbasa, add a half a quart of cooked beans, then add half a quart of broth, meat stock, or even plain water. (Save the other half quart of beans and broth for the moment.)
While that is heating, purée the rest of the beans and broth together. Add to the soup. (Doing this makes the soup creamier without adding any starches or dairy. It is optional; skip it if you want to save time or prefer a brothier, less creamy soup.)
Once the soup is bubbling, add salt and pepper to taste. You can add any herbs you want as well, but the soup will have plenty of flavor if you don’t. That’s it!
Is White Bean and Sausage Soup GAPS compliant?
Most of my recipes are either GAPS recipes or easily GAPS adaptable. This one isn’t exactly a GAPS recipe, mainly because of the kielbasa.
The particular kielbasa pictured above is about as close as I have seen to a GAPS kielbasa, but it is still a processed meat and thus not a GAPS food. Make your own determination; a plain meat would be GAPS friendly but taste very different in the soup.
Also, I used Great Northern beans. Those are not GAPS compliant, but navy beans are. The reason for this is that navy beans are lower in starch than other beans. Use navy beans for GAPS bean soup on advanced GAPS. For GAPS compliance, boil the beans on the stove rather than pressure cooking.
Lentils are the other GAPS approved bean, and also work wonderfully in this recipe. They look and taste different, of course.
Creamy White Bean and Sausage Soup
Equipment
- soup pot
- immersion blender, blender, or food processor
Ingredients
- 1 bag each frozen mirepoix and frozen Cajun mirepoix OR
- 1-2 chopped onions
- 2-3 stalks chopped celery
- 1-2 peeled, chopped carrots
- 1/2-1 chopped bell pepper
- 3-6 cloves minced garlic
- 2 T preferred cooking fat (bacon fat is great!)
- 4-6 chopped kielbasa sausages (about 1-2 cups)
- 1 quart cooked white beans
- 1 quart broth, stock, or water
- salt and pepper to taste
Instructions
- Chop vegetables if using fresh.
- Melt fat in soup pot until it is bubbling. Add all vegetables and sauté until soft.
- Chop kielbasa and add to vegetables.
- Add half the broth and half the beans to the pot.
- Separately blend the remaining beans and broth until smooth and add to the pot.
- When the soup is hot, salt and pepper to taste and serve.
Make Creamy White Bean and Sausage Soup Your Way!
- Use different beans– any bean will work, even peas and lentils. The soup will look different, of course.
- Switch the vegetables according to what you have on hand, what you like, or whatever. Use more, use less, use different ones…
- Try a different sausage– as tasty as kielbasa is, you could use something totally different, such as chorizo, Italian sausage, andouille sausages, etc.
- Add some herbs– whatever you like!
- Add milk, cream, sour cream, coconut milk, etc., for an even creamier soup.
- Stir in chopped greens at the end.
- Top with shredded cheese, sour cream, chopped onion or green onion, parsley, etc.
Want more soup? Try one of these: