Super simple recipe for a chilly night. We seem to have lost the February sunshine and gone into a spell of blustery cool weather.
Saucisse de Morteau is a well known French smoked sausage. It requires cooking in boiling water for 40 minutes but if you add it to the cooking water of your beans (I used flageolet but you could use haricot or even chickpeas) you get all that heavenly smoky flavour in your pulses too.
Saucesse de Morteau is a protected product (it has an IGP) which means it must meet a strict set of regulations that surround its production. It must come from pigs nourished exclusively on the whey that is a byproduct in the cheese making process and it must be smoked over pine or spruce wood (a tradition that goes back more than 1000 years). The smoking is a long gentle process with no artificial colourings of additives permitted.
So, basically you buy your Morteau (they are chunky so one is easily enough for 2 generous servings). You soak your beans overnight and cook them until there is about an hour left (flageolet take a good 2 hours to cook).
Add a couple of cloves of garlic to your cold water, pop in your beans, season with salt and pepper and add a couple of bay leaves. Bring to the boil, skim the surface of any solids and then simmer on a low heat. Add your Morteau sausage to the partly cooked beans and leave until they are completely cooked.
In a separate frying pan I slowly fried off 2 onions finely chopped, a teaspoon of dried thyme and about 200g of lardons (little cubes of smoked bacon). When the beans were cooked I drained off a little of the cooking water (don’t throw it away it is amazingly yummy added as a stock for soup). I removed the Morteau and added the onions and lardons to the beans, mixed them all up, brought to the boil and then served a ladle full of beans with the sliced Morteau on top.
