Get your tastebuds ready for fall with a recipe that’s packed with flavor and color

Summer is winding down and the transition to fall can be a little unsettling. The weather’s not really hot anymore — but it’s not really cold either. And the days begin to grow a little shorter in the approach to daylight savings time.

We can’t tell you what to wear as the temperatures drop or how to use your precious hours of daylight. But Dan Souza, chief content officer for America’s Test Kitchen, can help you figure out what foods to put on your pre-fall menu.

“This is an interesting time of year,” Souza told Morning Edition. “We sometimes call it shoulder season, the season between seasons. You’re looking [to cook] something that’s a little bit heartier, a little bit richer.”

Souza showed NPR’s A Martinez how to make the delicious recipe of white beans and chorizo with quick-marinated tomatoes and onions — the perfect dish for saying goodbye to summer and hello to autumn.

“It’s a recipe that I think totally checks all of the boxes,” Souza said. “It’s one of our most popular trending recipes right now. It feels really, really fresh like summer. But there’s a heartiness to it, too, that really hints at the fall and kind of what is to come.”

You can follow along below to learn how to make the recipe yourself.

The following interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

The virgin in extra-virgin olive oil

A Martinez: I’ve always been dying to know this. What makes olive oil extra virgin?

Dan Souza: So there’s rules around this. And basically, when you pick olives and you go to squeeze them, essentially to get the oil out of them, you can do it cold with just manual pressure. And that oil that comes out first without anything else added to the process that is extra virgin. And you can then add heat, you can add different processes to it to extract more oil. But in doing so, you are losing a ton of volatile flavors, you’re losing a lot of complexity. So extra virgin olive oil is that first cold pressing and it is packed with flavor. And that’s why it’s much more expensive. That’s why it’s kind of coveted.

A Martinez: Okay. So I was thinking about starting a new business. What if I say I have extra, extra virgin olive oil?

Dan Souza: If you have extra extra virgin olive oil, it might still be in the olive.

Delicious and colorful fat

Dan Souza: We’re going to work with some Spanish-style chorizo. We’re going to cook it, which is going to crisp it up and get a lot more flavor to it and also render out a lot of fat. That fat is going to be orange and beautiful and that’s going to coat and season everything in the dish. So what’s really nice is a lot of the flavor in the chorizo is leaching out and it’s going to spread throughout the dish and really provide that smoky, garlicky, really beautiful chorizo flavor in every bite, even if you’re not taking that actual bite of chorizo.

A Martinez: Could this work with a vegan chorizo of some kind? Because I notice how the fat is playing such a big role in this dish so I’m wondering, can a vegan [alternative] work?

Dan Souza: Yeah, absolutely. Vegan sausages have plenty of fat. It’s just not an animal source. That fat is going to pick up all the flavor that’s in that sausage and it’s going to leach out [into the other ingredients.]

The end of vegan meats?

A Martinez: You and I have cooked vegan things before. We did an Impossible Burger we’ve used Beyond Meat. But, you know, seeing how both companies, Beyond Meat and Impossible burger are struggling [financially], I’m wondering, is that something that’s been a surprise considering how so many people turned to these kinds of products over the last few years?

Dan Souza: Yeah, you know, we’re constantly seeing shifts in tastes, and I always think of it as pendulum swings, like we’re never really quite in the middle. It’s always a little to this extreme and a little to that extreme. So I think there will absolutely be a continued audience there.

A Martinez: One of the things that I also hear from people too is that they want to eat healthy. So they’re looking at these vegan options, these vegan companies that make patties and things that substitute for meat. But when people read the [ingredients] label, they feel like they’re going back to chemistry class.

Dan Souza: Yeah, animal protein is a very complex thing. What [the vegan meat companies] have achieved is actually pretty incredible with some of these products that really can mimic meat in a way that even a staunch carnivore is like, “Oh, this is actually a really good burger.” But to get there, there is a lot of processing that goes into it. You have to make some really informed decisions.