White Bean

How good does a pot of this soup on the stove on a chilly, soccer-packed fall Saturday sound?

This zesty salad is big on beans and packs plenty of protein and vitamins!

The inspiration for test kitchen director Ruth Cousineau’s velvety chilled bean soup comes from Mediterranean-cooking authority Claudia Roden's recipe for bissara, an Egyptian bean-and-herb purée. The beans here are lima and green, simmered in chicken broth (you can use vegetable broth if you want to go vegetarian) and then puréed until silky. The herbs—parsley, cilantro, dill, and mint—are blended with olive oil so that you can finish the soup with a verdant drizzle, but don’t think of the herb oil as merely a garnish: Its bright flavor brings everything together.

In this remarkably tasty side-dish vegetable, instant stock powder provides a long-cooked depth of flavor in minutes. The rich creaminess of the white beans transforms frozen spinach into a healthful and delicious version of creamed spinach. It's not just a side dish though: Use leftover "creamed" spinach as a sauce for pasta or grains (season a bit more heavily) or thin it with enough vegetable stotck to turn it into a soup.

Tuscans are commonly known as mangiafagioli, or bean eaters, and when you simmer cannellini beans on top of the stove and then finish them in the oven with a fresh tomato ragù, you'll understand why. The dish is saucy and comforting—have plenty of good bread on hand—with welcome bursts of acidity from the extra tomatoes scattered on top of the casserole. Grape tomatoes tend to have a sweeter, more concentrated flavor than cherry tomatoes.

Editor's note: The recipe and introductory text below are excerpted from Diane Kochilas's book Meze: Small Plates to Savor and Share from the Mediterranean Table. Kochilas also shared some helpful cooking tips exclusively with Epicurious, which we've added at the bottom of the page. To read more about Kochilas and Greek cuisine, click here. Giant beans in some form or another are never absent from Greek meze menus. The key to making this dish taste as good as possible is to use high-quality roasted sweet peppers preserved in extra virgin olive oil. I usually make my own oil, and have them on hand. All you need to do is roast the peppers whole under the broiler, let them cool, peel them, and store them in a container in the fridge covered with good olive oil. You can pour a few tablespoons of the pepper-infused oil into the baking dish for added flavor. As for the beans themselves, the trick is to get the texture right. Giant beans need first to be soaked, then boiled, and finally baked. Once done, they should be soft, almost buttery, without being baked to the point that they fall apart.

If you're pressed for time, you can sub 1 1/2 cups canned beans for the dried. There's no need to precook the canned beans—just drain and rinse them before adding them to the onions.

At his restaurant, Ford's Filling Station, in Culver City, California, Ben Ford says he strives to serve "things that you don't necessarily identify with traditional comfort food but that give all the [same] nourishment." This signature recipe for flatbread—a very thin "pizza" with sweet shrimp, white bean hummus, melted leeks, caramelized onions, and a scattering of sharp cheese—is comforting and satisfying yet anything but bland or conventional.

Incorporating tender slow-roasted pork into a sugo (sauce) brings out its fullest potential.

Patience is the key to this soul-satisfying soup chock-full of winter greens. Its depth of flavor comes from cooking the soffritto—a mixture of pancetta, onion, celery, carrots, and the ribs from the chard—for a good 45 minutes and from browning the tomato paste. The result is so savory that there's no need for broth; water, canned tomatoes, and a parmesan rind work beautifully. And because this soup must cook slowly, don't worry about prepping all your vegetables before you begin—you can simply chop as you go.

In this rustic marriage of land and sea, red-pepper flakes add just the right amount of heat to hearty potatoes and wonderfully tender octopus (from a can!)

The resulting dish is brothy but thick; it can be thinned with stock for a more traditional soup.

Dried beans don’t always need to soak overnight. Just prepare them as instructed below.

Mashed potatoes are a tried-and-true side dish with steak, but for something new, try an Italian purée of white beans—it's just as creamy and much faster.

Few can resist this soup-stew of tender cannellini beans, silken pork shoulder, tomatoes, and herbs. We give the cherry tomatoes a little extra love in the oven to boost their flavor before we stir them into the beans. Rosemary is a natural in this dish, but it’s the generous amount of parsley added at the end that’s the real revelation. The herb adds a zesty top note to the beans. Simple side dishes—garlic bread, a green salad—complete the picture.

The white bean, sun-dried tomato, and Feta mixture can be prepared up to six hours in advance, but it's best to toast the bread at the last minute.

Evocative of cassoulet but so much easier, this bean soup manages to be both rugged and elegant. No part of the confit duck legs goes to waste: The bones add savor to the beans, the meat goes into the soup, and the crisped skin makes a delectable garnish. Flambéing the Armagnac before adding it to the pot takes the edge off the alcohol while leaving behind the deep flavor of the barrel.

Puttanesca is usually a pasta sauce, but here the addition of beans to the spicy blend of tomatoes, basil, and olives turns it into a versatile, satisfying side dish.

A leek, carrot, and celery mirepoix, cooked until tender with rich white beans, gets a crisp, crunchy texture and delightfully rustic flavor from a garlicky bread-crumb topping flecked with parsley.

The tangy sweetness of cherry tomatoes contrasts nicely with the plump, smoky chops, while green-olive paste gives a briny edge to the white beans.

Residents of Brunswick, Georgia, and Brunswick County, Virginia, are both fiercely protective of the provenance of this dish, but let's face it—hunters have lived off this sort of thing forever. Like all stews, this tastes even better the next day.

Here, broccoli gets turned into irresistible finger food, while silken tofu adds a creamy touch to the dairy-free dip.