What’s the forum, you ask? It’s http://www.forumthermomix.com
It has an abundance of recipes, tips, tweaks and general thermomix chat. I’m a bit addicted. So if you don’t know about it – get on it!
The recipe is from Guy Grossi. He’s one of my favourite Melbourne Chefs – for many years I was a Friday regular in the cheap seats at the Grossi Florentino Cellar Bar with a group of my work colleagues. His food always reminds me of good friends, laughter and hilarious war stories.
Anyway, back to the soup. This is as simple as it gets to make. Oil, garlic, onion, beans, fontina cheese and truffle. You can substitute truffle oil for truffle if you don’t have any – and let’s face it, I bet there’s not that many of us that have truffle sitting around waiting to be used!! So, I used truffle oil, which I always have in my cupboard – I often add some of it to the mushroom risotto, as well as some rehydrated porcini mushrooms. Yum! I use the Simon Johnson brand, but I am sure there are many others out there.
Once you’ve added the beans to the thermomix bowl, it can be a little noisy. The noise dies down after a few minutes once the beans start to soften in the stock. I used water and homemade vegetable stock concentrate – (mainly because I want to use my batch of chicken stock to serve as a consommé with the dumplings when I make them again. I’m going to use Heston Blumenthal’s stock clarifying method and see how it works) – and it had a lovely mellow flavour – surprisingly truffley considering the relatively small amount of truffle oil in the recipe.
This makes a really rich soup – I poured it into three bowls as we had a friend pop over at lunch time, but it would easily have done five serves – it really is quite satisfying. I served it with bread, which frankly, I didn’t need to eat – but it was Phillippa’s bread, and it was fresh!!
This soup forms a skin fairly quickly – so it’s really a soup that you’d want to make and serve immediately, otherwise you’d need to return to the thermomix, heat and blitz for a while to get rid of any chunky bits.
In the Mix Tricks 
Tess
May 31, 2012 at 5:15 am
I also wondered about using tinned beans and figured you’d have to reduce some of the liquid since the tinned beans wouldn’t absorb any but the dry ones would.
The first time I made it I soaked the beans for a few hours because it was hard to believe they’d cook properly in one hour, but speed 3 seems to cut them up into smaller and smaller pieces as they go and they’re fine.
We’ve made this with both vegetable stock concentrate and commercially-prepared chicken stock, and definitely preferred the flavour of the latter.
wilbursmum
May 31, 2012 at 5:38 am
Hi there!
I had doubts about the beans cooking too, but they did. I’ve always steered away from cooking with dried beans because of the soaking factor and generally not being organised enough…(as a rude aside, I’ve also heard that soaking reduces the fart factor of some beans…).
I’ll have to try it with chicken stock and see what the difference is! I have some chicken wings in the freezer so I’ll give them a go this weekend for some stock and do another batch of this next week.
WIlbursmum
Tess
May 31, 2012 at 10:21 am
I love cooking with dried beans, and have tried every trick out there to avoid the fart factor, but nothing works except eating enough of it that your system adjusts.
Bradford
January 14, 2013 at 7:59 pm
I made this soup today with the tinned beans.
I figured that the 1500 grams of stock and 200 grams of dried beans (1700 total) would be the equivalent of the 3 tins of beans and the balance of the 1700 grams in stock.
The soup turned out a bit thin but still tasty.
I plan on making it again with the dry beans so I can guage how much further to reduce the fluid if I again use tinned beans.
I’ll post my conclusion here.