Smoky White Bean & Ham Soup
This post may contain affiliate links. Read my full disclosure policy.
This Southern-style smoky white bean and ham soup adapted from chef Hugh Acheson is hearty and comforting.
This rich and smoky white bean and ham soup is modestly adapted from Georgia chef Hugh Acheson’s cookbook, How to Cook: Building Blocks and 100 Simple Recipes for a Lifetime of Meals. The book is intended for kitchen novices—Acheson wrote it with his teenage daughters, Beatrice and Clementine, in mind—but I think it’s a wonderful resource for seasoned cooks, too. This recipe, for example, begins with a lesson on how to cook dried beans, a skill every cook should have, and then shows how to transform them into a flavorful, hearty soup by adding smoked ham hocks, chicken stock, vegetables, and herbs.
I made a few tweaks to the recipe, like adding more ham and puréeing a portion of the soup to thicken it up a bit. Feel free to skip the puréeing step if you prefer a brothier soup.
Table of Contents
What You’ll Need to Make Smoky White Bean & Ham Soup
Smoked ham hocks, or pork knuckles, come from the ankle region of the pig’s leg. In Southern cooking, hocks are often used to add a rich, meaty, and smoky flavor to soups, stews, and greens. They are available in most supermarkets and are very inexpensive. If for some reason you can’t find them, pork shank can be substituted.
Step-by-Step Instructions
Step 1: Quick-Soak the Beans
Place the beans in a large pot and cover with 2 to 3 inches of water.
Bring to a boil, then remove from the heat and let sit for one hour.
Drain the beans.
Step 2: Make the White Bean & Ham Soup
Place the drained beans into a 5.5-quart Dutch oven or large pot. Add the water, chicken stock, bay leaves, quartered onion, and ham hocks.
Bring to a boil over high heat, then cover and simmer over low heat until the beans are just tender, about 1 hour (depending on the size of the beans, it could take a bit longer).
Once the beans are tender, pull out the bay leaves, onion remnants, and ham hocks. Discard the bay leaves and onions, but set the ham hocks aside to cool.
Add the minced onion, carrots, celery, tomatoes, garlic, thyme, and 2 teaspoons of salt to the pot.
Increase the heat to medium and cook, uncovered, for 15 minutes.
Meanwhile, while the soup is cooking, and when the ham hocks are cool enough to handle, pull the meat from the hocks, discard any bone, fat, and tough sinew, and chop the meat finely.
Use a ladle to transfer about 2 cups of the beans and vegetables, along with a bit of broth, to a blender or food processor. (If using a blender, be sure to remove the center knob on the lid and cover with a dishtowel to avoid splatters.)
Purée until smooth.
Stir the mixture back into the soup.
Add the meat and kale to the soup.
Simmer over medium-low heat for 5 minutes more.
Taste and adjust the seasoning with more salt, if necessary. At this point, you can serve the soup or refrigerate it for up to 3 days. When you’re ready to eat, garnish each bowl with a drizzle with olive oil (if using) and a heap of grated cheese.
You May Also Like
Smoky White Bean and Ham Soup
This Southern-style smoky white bean and ham soup adapted from chef Hugh Acheson is hearty and comforting.
Ingredients
- 1 pound dried white navy beans or Great Northern beans, rinsed and checked for stones
- 6 cups water
- 4 cups chicken stock
- 2 bay leaves
- 1 yellow onion, peeled and quartered, plus ½ cup minced (you'll need 2 onions)
- 2 pounds smoked ham hocks
- 2 carrots, diced
- 2 celery stalks, diced
- 1 (14 oz) can chopped or diced tomatoes
- 4 garlic cloves, minced
- 1 tablespoon chopped fresh thyme leaves
- Salt
- 1½ cups chopped kale or other dark leafy greens
- Extra-virgin olive oil, for serving (optional)
- Finely grated pecorino Romano or Parmigiano Reggiano, for serving
Instructions
- Quick-soak the beans: Place the beans in a medium pot and cover with 2 to 3 inches of water. Bring to a boil over high heat and cook for 1 minute. Remove the pot from the heat and let sit for 1 hour. Drain in a colander.
- Place the drained beans into a 5.5-quart Dutch oven or large pot. Add the water, chicken stock, bay leaves, quartered onion, and ham hocks. Bring to a boil over high heat, then cover and simmer over low heat until the beans are just tender, about 1 hour (depending on the size of the beans, it could take a bit longer).
- Once the beans are tender, pull out the bay leaves, onion remnants, and ham hocks. Discard the bay leaves and onions, but set the ham hocks aside to cool.
- Add the minced onion, carrots, celery, tomatoes, garlic, thyme, and 2 teaspoons of salt to the pot. Increase the heat to medium and cook, uncovered, for 15 minutes. While the soup is cooking, and when the ham hocks are cool enough to handle, pull the meat from the hocks, discard any bone, fat, and tough sinew, and chop the meat finely.
- Use a ladle to transfer about 2 cups of the beans and vegetables, along with a bit of broth, to a blender or food processor. (If using a blender, be sure to remove the center knob on the lid and cover with a dishtowel to avoid splatters.) Purée until smooth, and then stir the mixture back into the soup. Add the meat and kale to the soup and simmer over medium-low heat for 5 minutes more. Taste and adjust the seasoning with more salt, if necessary (I usually add about 1 teaspoon more; beans require a lot of salt to bring out their flavor). At this point, you can serve the soup or refrigerate it for up to 3 days. (It will thicken up in the fridge; thin it with a bit of water, if necessary.)
- When you're ready to eat, garnish each bowl with a drizzle with olive oil (if using) and a heap of grated cheese.
- Freezer-Friendly Instructions: The soup can be frozen for up to 3 months. Defrost the soup in the refrigerator for 12 hours and then reheat it on the stovetop over medium heat until hot. through.
Pair with
Nutrition Information
Powered by 
- Per serving (Nutritional data is based on 2 tsp salt and does not include oil and cheese - 8 servings)
- Calories: 468
- Fat: 14g
- Saturated fat: 4g
- Carbohydrates: 46g
- Sugar: 7g
- Fiber: 11g
- Protein: 41g
- Sodium: 1326mg
- Cholesterol: 73mg
This website is written and produced for informational purposes only. I am not a certified nutritionist and the nutritional data on this site has not been evaluated or approved by a nutritionist or the Food and Drug Administration. Nutritional information is offered as a courtesy and should not be construed as a guarantee. The data is calculated through an online nutritional calculator, Edamam.com. Although I do my best to provide accurate nutritional information, these figures should be considered estimates only. Varying factors such as product types or brands purchased, natural fluctuations in fresh produce, and the way ingredients are processed change the effective nutritional information in any given recipe. Furthermore, different online calculators provide different results depending on their own nutrition fact sources and algorithms. To obtain the most accurate nutritional information in a given recipe, you should calculate the nutritional information with the actual ingredients used in your recipe, using your preferred nutrition calculator.
See more recipes:
Comments
Add a Comment
This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.
Made this tonight, with variations, and it was delicious, according to my fairly finicky family 🙂
We all just got the email newsletter this morning, so it was subject to ingredients on hand: I chopped smoked ham on the bone (for the ham hocks), fresh spinach instead of kale, white kidney beans (canned), and veggie broth. I prefer veggie broth to canned or boxed chicken broth, which I consider rather vile. Since veggie broth has a lot of celery, I omitted celery, and used just one carrot. As a process change, I pulsed using an immersion blender to avoid the food processor step and extra cleanup. Do this prior to adding the ham and greens if you go this route.
I sautéd the onion as a first step…can’t recall if that was in the recipe… then just threw it all together. It really was delicious! Thanks, Jen, for working so hard on this site. Every recipe I’ve tried has been superb and very well explained!
We just had this for supper tonight, and it’s absolutely delicious.
I have a pot of this simmer on the stove right now and my kitchen smell delightful.
I saw this recipe this morning and happened to have all the ingredients on hand to make this for dinner. The only change was accidental, I chopped up Swiss Chard before I realized I’d grabbed that out of the fridge instead of the kale…oops!
Sampling this to adjust the last teaspoon of salt told me this is a definite keeper.
I did use a wild boar smoked hock because a friend shared some wild boar with me.
It is wonderful….even with chard😊
I followed the recipe and this tastes delicious! I found the ham hocks at Stop and Shop. I can’t wait to serve it to my family! Thanks Jenn!
Is there any way you could transform this recipe to an Instapot version? I am seriously thinking of purchasing one. I hear beans take no time to cook.
In the meantime, will try it on the stove top once I buy the beans.
Oh, anyway one can tell how fresh the beans are when buying them?
Much thanks.
Sunny Drohan
Hi Sunny, I don’t have enough experience with it to tell you confidently whether or not/how to convert this to an instant pot, so you may want to take a peek at these tips. It looks like they could be useful. And if you’re buying the beans out of a bulk bin, I’m not sure there’s a way to tell how fresh they are (though you could ask the store if there’s a system they use to indicate that). If buying packaged beans, you can look for the “Best By” date. Hope that helps!
Hi Jenn, any suggestions on what meat could I substitute for ham?
Thanks
Radiya
Hi Radiya, Smoked turkey legs would work well. I’d love to know how it turns out if you try it.
Can you make this in a slow cooker?
Sure, Cindylou – I think it should work.
ok to freeze?
Sure, I think you could get away with freezing it. Enjoy!
This looks delicious and am excited to make it. Would it be ok to use rinsed canned beans and shorten the cooking time? Or would the flavor be diminished with pre-cooked beans?
And just a suggestion: I can’t rate the recipe yet because I haven’t made it but I don’t want to leave zero stars which would look like I didn’t like the recipe. Maybe you could separate the questions from the reviews so when someone just has a question, they’re not asked to rate the recipe.
Hi DV, Canned beans will work, but it won’t really cut down on the cooking time because the ham hocks need to cook for at least 1 hour to get tender. You could probably do a different version with bacon, which doesn’t need to cook for that long, if you wanted to use canned beans. If you go that route, I’d add a few slices of bacon to simmer with the broth to add flavor, then take them out and discard before serving — and then I’d crisp up a few slices in a frying pan and crumble them over the soup before serving. (It’s fine to just skip the rating; it won’t show as zero stars or affect the overall rating of the recipe. I will try to find a way to make that more clear.) Hope that helps!
Hi, I like the idea to use bacon. When you suggest to add a few slices to simmer with the broth, do you put in raw/uncooked bacon that you will take out after?
Yes, you would put it in raw and then discard it after the soup is done simmering. Hope you enjoy!
Thank you
For those of us who don’t eat pork, is there any way to modify this recipe?
Hi Danielle, I think smoked turkey legs would work well. You could also just omit it, but you’ll likely need to add more seasoning.
How would the spices need to be adjusted to make this recipe vegetarian?
Hi Naz, you can leave out the ham hock, and to add a bit more flavor, you could add either a pinch of smoked paprika or put a Parmesan rind in the soup while it’s simmering. Hope that helps and please LMK how it turns out if you try it with either of those alternatives!
I made the vegetarian version and it was absolutely delicious!! My husband swears it tasted like ham. I added smoked paprika and put a Parmesan rind in the soup while simmering. I also used spinach for the greens.