PIYAZ / GIGANTES BEAN STEW
(The Zaytinya Cookbook)
I love gigantes beans / butter beans and am always in search of a new way to eat them.
I am puzzled as to why the recipe has you cook the beans with onion and potato that are then discarded — I could see the onion possibly flavoring the beans, but what is the potato doing? Adding starch? The beans have plenty of starch for me, so I skipped it. I soaked the beans overnight and then cooked them in the pressure cooker as usual. Gigantes always take much longer than I expect, and it was no different this time — about 35 mins, having checked after 20 and 30.
I couldn’t find my sun-dried tomatoes (because I can’t remember the last time I used them — turns out they were safely in the back of the fridge, discovered after I finished cooking), so I used a bit of tomato paste. Last swap was cilantro for dill, for preference.
The dish tastes pretty flat until the ladolemono at the end — the lemon juice and honey bring everything together. Not sure that a dressing needs to be made unless you want to use it for something else, the individual ingredients could as easily be added.
This is a nice gigantes bean variation, and pretty easy if you cook the beans another day, or use canned beans. Would also work well with any white bean or chickpeas, if the jumbo beans are harder to source.
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