Tavče Gravče (White Beans Baked in a Clay Pan)

Variations

• Tetovo style: the town the dish is best known from. Large beans and plenty of paprika.
• With smoked meat: as the sources give it, diced smoked meat or sausage goes in. Some cooks lay sausages on top to bake.
• Parsley goes in with the seasoning.
• The name: tava is a pan or pot and grav is bean; both take a diminutive, so the name is an affectionate way of saying beans in a little pan.
• About the photograph: the dish shown is in a striped earthenware tava, and its top is a glossy sauce rather than a set skin. That is what a shorter bake gives; a longer one sets the surface further.

Tips

• The onion's long cooking is paid for in the bean water, not in the fat. Blooming spices ranks the aromatics by how long they take, and onion comes first as "the slowest." The usual answer is to put the onion into the fat first and pay that time there. This dish puts the onion whole into the bean pot and pays the time in water, and the onion's flavour goes into the beans while it does. By the time it is lifted out and chopped it is fully cooked, and all the pan has to do is carry the flour and paprika into the oil. That is why the fry takes a minute or two.
• Which protects the paprika twice. Goulash explains why its onion goes first and slow: "it also gives you a pan full of fat and soft onion for the paprika to land in rather than bare hot metal." Patatas bravas gives the other protection: "The flour in the brava sauce is protecting the paprika." In this pan both happen at once. The onion comes out of the pot still soft and wet, and the flour is already in. Even so, turn the heat down; thirty seconds is enough for the paprika.
• The first boiling water goes too. Soaking discards bean soaking water because "the indigestible oligosaccharides leach into it." This dish goes one step further the same way and discards the first ten minutes of boiling water as well. The water after that is kept: it loosens the fry and sets the level before baking.
• Leave the chillies whole, for kedjenou's reason: "Adding it whole is precisely what lets you decide the heat at the end."
• Bring the liquid to the level of the beans. The bake in the tava is there to set the surface, and cassoulet's warning applies: "Flood it and no crust will form; leave it short and the surface burns instead of drying." Unlike cassoulet, though, the surface is not broken and rebuilt. It sets once and is served as it is — the side of gratin dauphinois, which cassoulet calls its own opposite: "That one raises the heat at the end to bring up a crust and serves it as it is — the crust is the result."
• Salt after the beans are cooked. Season when the onion goes back in, and taste first if smoked meat is in.