Pork shin, chorizo and red pepper stew

This takes about 10 minutes to throw together before just being left to simmer away, and heats up easily during a week to serve with freshly cooked pasta.  Pretty basic but I think it's great!  I've done a similar lamb and bean stew before that works the same... I gotta blog about that one!

Serves approx 6


4 sections of pork shin cut in the style of osso bucco
500g pork ribs
1 large spicy chorizo sausage, sliced into 1 inch sections
3 tbsp olive oil
5 large cloves of garlic, chopped
1 jar roast red peppers
1 ~700g jar of passata or soffrito
1/2 tbsp flakey salt
Ground black pepper
2 cans canellini beans (or 1 jar of pre-cooked Spanish white beans called Alubias)
Pasta to serve with

In a very large casserole dish, heat the oil then brown the meat.  First the pork, then the chorizo which you may be able to just add to the pork leaving everything in there.  You don't strictly have to brown each piece of meat perfectly in this instance, it's just good to take the meat, and the browning which will gather on the bottom of the dish, to the right stage overall.  You certainly don't want to keep going until anything burns.

Add the garlic, season heavily with pepper and stir over a heat to fry the garlic without burning.  This takes around 30 seconds.

Add the passata or soffrito, the red peppers roughly sliced, salt and water to cover.  Bring to a boil, skim off any scum that gathers on the surface, reduce the heat to a very low simmer and cover, or partially cover, for 2 hours.  If you have a very low heat setting on your hob then you can fully cover it.  Otherwise partially covering the casserole should stop the contents from boiling too hard.

Drain the beans, wash them and add them for a final half an hour.

Whenever you wish to serve a portion, half cook pasta in boiling water then add to the stew to finish cooking in there.  Taste for salt before serving.  Again kale would be nice with this in a caldo-verde way.  See pork with cider onions and cloves blog for how to cook.