Verdinas con Almejas

If there are two things Asturians like as much as cider and cheese, they are beans and seafood. The combination is so popular that that beans called verdinas are also referred to as fabes de marisco – seafood beans. And when it comes to combining beans and seafood, the most loved dish is verdinas con almejas. You fill find this succulent seafood stew of flageolet beans and clams in every Asturian cookbook. And there are as many variations as there are cooks in Asturias. This is mine.

Choosing Good Clams

1. The first decision you need to make is: fresh or frozen clams? If you opt for frozen, skip to step 3 below.
2. For fresh clams, you need to know what to look for:
   1. Live clams will be on ice, in mesh bags at the supermarket or fishmonger.
   2. Hard-shell (quahog, little neck, or chowder) clams must be tightly closed. Any that don’t close up when you tap on the shell are dead. Discard them.
   3. Soft-shell (Ipswich or longneck) clams cannot close all the way. They do move or flex when tapped, however. Discard any that do not.
   4. Fresh clams do not smell fishy. The aroma of a good clam is briny and clean, like salty sea air. Do not buy fishy smelling clams.
3. Store your clams according to their status. Live clams are best when used the same day. You can, if you must, store them in the refrigerator for 24 hours. Frozen clams you store in the freezer until the day before you want to use them. One day before cooking, move frozen clams to the fridge to thaw.
4. To clean your clams, always assume the worst. Even if they are sold to you as scrubbed and pre-purged, do it all yourself. It will never hurt.
   1. First, scrub the clam shells with a stiff brush under cool running water.
   2. Scrape any barnacles off with the back of a knife.
5. If you have live clams, they will need to be purged. Add some non-iodized (kosher) salt to a pot of water. Soak the clams for 20 or 30 minutes, then change the water. Keep changing the water until the clams no longer expel sand or grit. Usually this requires two or three changes of water. Budget your time accordingly!

Now you have clean, sand-free clams, ready for your verdinas con almejas.

Finding Good Beans

You may know verdinas by their French name – flageolets. In both cases, they are the same thing: immature kidney beans. They are harvested before they fully mature, and retain their pale-green color. Finding them is not hard. In the US they are usually available dried. You will see them in packages more often than with the loose or bulk beans.

First, look in the specialty bean section of your grocery store. You are likely to find them there, especially in bigger cities. If you cannot find them there, gourmet and specialty grocers will almost certainly have them. As a last resort, they are easily sourced online.

Ingedients

• 500 g Verdinas. Verdinas are, as best I can tell, a local landrace of the Chevrier flageolet bean from France. Therefore, feel free to substitute any dried green flageolet you can get your hands on. Failing that, it is worth remembering that the flageolet is an immature kidney bean, so any small white beans used for baked dishes (such and great northern or cannellini) will be an acceptable, if not exact, substitute. Fully matured kidney beans, while delicious, are NOT a good substitute.
• 1 kg clams. Frozen is fine if you don’t have access to good fresh clams.
• 1 medium onion. Brown Spanish type, roughly chopped
• 3 cloves garlic. Diced small.
• 1/2 Leek. White part only, sliced into rounds.
• 1 bay leaf.
• 60 ml neutral vegetable oil.
• 50 g still cider, or dry white wine.
• 10 g corn starch.

Instructions

1. Rinse, then soak the beans in cold water overnight. (If using frozen clams, thaw them in the refrigerator at this point.)
2. In the morning, pour off the soaking water and add fresh water.
3. Add the bay leaf, leek, and onion to the pot.
4. Cook over gentle heat, never boiling the beans. We want to gently coddle them into cooking, so as to not have the skins split. For the same reason, do not stir the beans except very gently.
5. While the beans are cooking, prepare your clams:
   1. If you purchased frozen, you should need nothing but to open the package and give them a quick rinse.
   2. If using fresh clams, you need to soak them in fresh water for 20 minutes or so. As the clams breathe they filter water. When the fresh water is filtered, the clam pushes salt water and sand out of their shells. After 20 minutes, the clams will have cleaned themselves of much of the salt and sand they have collected.
6. In a wide pan, heat the olive oil over medium heat until shimmering.
7. Add your diced garlic and cook until until fragrant, approximately 5 minutes.
8. Add your clams, sprinkle with parsley, splash on the wine or cider, and cover for 5 minutes.
9. Check that the clams are all opened. If only a few are not, wait another 5 minutes. If there are unopened ones at the end of the 10 minutes, fish them out and discard them.
10. Set the clams aside until the beans are finished cooking.
11. When your beans are tender, mix the corn starch with a spoonful of cold water to make a slurry and gently stir it into your beans.
12. Add the clams, liquid and all, to your bean pot.
13. Return the bean pot to medium heat and cook a further 5-10 minutes, to allow the corn starch to slightly thicken the broth.