Bean soup

I couldn't stand being without cannellini beans so I made the same thing again in soup form. 

The thing is, there is no stock in this at all. The soup was started with bacon and spices then augmented with onion and uncured ham then filled with water. It is mostly water. I wanted the spices to be bright and light not thick and heavy or overbearing. I wanted to keep room for additional spices to alter the flavor through successive reuses. 

Then a can of diced tomato was added after the beans were cooked and acid can safely be introduced without causing the surface of the beans to become tough. 

Flavor adjusted to finish with brown sugar and chile flakes, which had the effect, if you will bear with it, of punching out the profile, that is how I visualize the thing that is happening -- making the dish more interesting by creating spikes in different directions zip and zap but just a little to fill it out. Say you were an artist hammering out a burial mask out of a sheet of gold from the inside out and now creating a nose on an otherwise flat face. You would want a regular normal human-like nose that sticks out but not too much, an inconspicuous nose not a Cyrano de Bergerac nose nor a Pinocchio nose. 

I can see how a simple flavorful soup like this would be a favorite at the Buckhorn Exchange. I made a lot of it and I intend to use it with a lot of things. 

The toasted bread discs are my own sourdough.